As a child, she sought truth.
She had no idea what it was,
what it looked like,
what it sounded like,
what it smelled like.
But it was as if it was all she knew.
She craved something she never knew.
She only knew it existed because she craved it.
But even then, she doubted its reality,
its truth,
its rawness.
She doubted and it scared her to death,
because the idea that the thing she so desired, sought after, yearned for, with all of her being from the depths of her heart,
that that thing could be false or nonexistent
was the greatest fall out of grace she imagined someone could ever experience,
and,
what if,
that someone
was her?
And so she wandered the halls of her loneliness,
meandering through the desolation of her worry and doubt,
aimlessly floating through the sea of her unformed faith.
She wondered where she was going,
if she was even going anywhere.
She wondered if the pain was about not going somewhere,
or if it was about going somewhere she did not want to.
She wondered why she felt such a horrible inexpressible sadness,
why, how could she feel these things when she hadn’t experienced the trauma and loss and pain that others seemed to experience?
How could she feel so lonely when she was so young?
How could she know the feeling of loss and abandonment when she had not lost nor been abandoned by anyone she knew?
The questions never seemed to stop,
endlessly cascading down into her consciousness,
reminding her of her slow and painful existence.
She faced these questions everyday,
and she felt she could go on no longer.
The questions loomed in her face,
almost seeming to laugh at her sincere desire to know truth
The questions seemed to make light of her intense yearning to be whole, to know who she was, to become what was unfolding within her.
She felt tears that wouldn’t fall from her eyes
sliding down the cavern of her heart,
full of disappointment
incompletion,
fear,
fear that she was living half a life and
it was all she was apportioned.
In that moment, she felt the greatest tragedy was
wanting a great magnificent life
and
being granted a meager bare bones existence.
She felt she had nowhere to go,
no one to talk to,
no one that could quite understand her.
How could anyone, when she could barely understand herself,
barely understand the questions that flowed,
barely understand the unfolding within her,
or that anything was even unfolding.
Nothing that had ever been taught seemed to matter or be relevant or speak to the part of her that only seemed to matter.
No sermon, no lesson, no heart-to-heart with her mother, a church leader, no book, no friendship.
Everything seemed to fall short, lame, and insufficient.
She wondered if anyone else knew what she was going through.
Every day felt like a failure because she didn’t know how to live.
Every day felt like shortness of breath,
nothing felt complete,
nothing felt real,
nothing felt worthwhile.
She grew into a young adult and she felt she could hold onto nothing any longer.
It was too long,
too many years of seeking and not finding,
yearning and not holding,
desiring and not realizing.
It was too long,
too long of a breath to hold,
too long of a road leading to nowhere.
Too long for her heart to keep hoping,
too long for her tenderness to remain tender,
too long,
so long,
it seemed everything she believed, desired, and thought about
turned into naivete.
A youthful wishful thinking,
really cute and full of rainbows.
When would any of this make sense???
Would it ever make sense?
It felt like madness she lived in, daily,
breath to breath.
Her liveliness shriveled into shreds of dry flesh, empty hopes, unfulfilled desires.
She remembered the times she felt most alive in her youth was when she was out playing, breathing in the full air, filling the atmosphere with her giddiness of being free and wild
and
those times in church when she felt a presence so great she knew she was real, that life was real, and there was something worth living for, with, into.
She had never been taught to merge the two,
never been taught that they went hand in hand.
And instead, she swallowed the lessons of society-defined maturity and coming-of-age,
quietly shelving her aliveness as memories of youth, of ignorance,
donning the mantle of serious endeavoring that was adulthood,
that was the rest of her life.
These were the lessons she took into the world.
When it was time for college, she vowed that things would be different, things would make sense,
that she would make them make sense.
She wanted so desperately to erase the memory of her emptiness,
the quiet suffering,
the intolerable loneliness.
She filled her belly with substances that took her places where memories fell away,
but that returned her to square one, with an even greater sorrow.
She filled her calendar and time with people that she thought would help her create a new image, a new reputation, a new life,
to find, that galivanting with them reminded her even more of her quest for oneness
Oneness with what?
She wasn’t sure,
perhaps they, out there, walking by her on campus,
in her mind,
would know?
She felt like she died every day, even worse than when she was young,
when all she had was her naivete,
because now, she had the means to do all the things,
to go all the places,
to change her appearance,
her personality,
her circle.
And yet, it was all wrong.
It felt even worse that she could do all the things, go all the places, change all the ways,
and still, the truth,
the truth so stubbornly remained,
taunting her in her complete loss of self, of direction, of life.
She knew that the universe knew,
God knew,
everyone else knew,
she knew,
that she was failing hard,
failing fast,
failing,
same as before.
Except it was becoming even more unbearable.
It was no longer an innocent desire, hope, calling,
but a desperate scream of horror, terror,
a funeral of the living.
There came a day, when she had given up wanting to feel,
feel good,
feel bad,
feel anything,
feel something.
A day when she gave up.
She wasn’t suicidal,
no, she didn’t have the energy for that.
She accepted that this was life,
this poor excuse of breath.
How could she think otherwise?
She had tried all avenues,
all routes,
all detours,
all methods of fulfillment known to her,
and here she was.
She accepted her fate,
accepted that she was the mistake she had been afraid she was,
and that since God didn’t make mistakes, she was just the one that got the short end of the stick,
eternally,
infinitely,
definitely.
It seemed fitting, after all her useless trying,
her futile yearning,
to come to a place of absolute desolation.
Her heart beat,
the blood flowed,
her lungs expanded and contracted on an invisible cue,
without her desire or command,
her hands and feet and body moved,
to school, to work, to home,
to sleep, to awakening,
to eating, to functioning.
And she came to find that if she let go of the desire to live,
then she could somehow survive,
on the fringes of life,
barely breathing,
breathing just enough to allow life to continue,
to allow herself to pass from one moment to the next.
Was it enough?
She made it so,
by contracting enough
so that it would be enough.
And so she lived, barely.
Then one day,
she came home after a day of work and community college,
after having to leave 4-year university due to circumstances outside her control,
– yet another reason to believe her life just utterly sucked –
and her mom,
ever the devout believer of God, of Christ,
took one look at her and asked if she (her mom) could pray for her (the daughter).
Up until then,
she had tried to fend off her mother’s religious advances,
built a wall against anything that could provide any sense of hope,
but,
in that moment,
there was no fight left.
No fight to even protect herself against the deadliness of desire,
of that familiar yearning to breathe fully and be breathed fully by the universe.
No fight left to shake a fist at everything that was wrong with her,
wrong with her life.
No fight left to scream that she was done.
She was so done,
her silence said it all,
her death to herself,
to any form of life within her.
She acquiesced,
not as a form of hope,
not as a form of submission,
not as a form of wanting more in life.
She acquiesced,
because she would rather get it over with,
she would rather not talk,
expend the precious little energy she had to get through every moment.
She acquiesced,
more like a stumbling onto the floor,
too tired to think,
too tired to breathe,
too tired to feel.
And she sat on the couch,
her mother sitting behind her,
both hands flat on her daughter’s back.
As her mother prayed silently,
she sat numbly,
she had no prayers of her own.
Did the dead pray?
Her eyes, closed, faced a blank wall.
Was she refusing to see,
or was there really nothing to see?
She couldn’t tell.
In the quiet,
in the absolute nothingness of her mind,
she became aware of a presence –
or rather, she became aware of Presence.
It wasn’t a being or an entity she was aware of.
It was a fullness of being.
She felt, in her body, the absolute truth of herself,
of what she considered God,
of Life,
and most definitely, of Love.
She saw, in her mind,
the image of her body floating around in black space,
completely lifeless,
a corpse.
She saw the emptiness that was her life reflected in this image
and she agreed – yes, that was she.
Every part of that image was true.
Then she saw a hand appear,
a huge ass hand,
bigger than her body,
made of something more glorious than human flesh –
and this hand, for whatever reason, neared her body,
and caressed her entire body,
from top of her head
to her toes.
In the moment of witnessing this motion,
she broke.
She broke like she’d never broken before
she broke like she’d never known what brokenness was
she broke like she’d never find wholeness forever.
She broke completely,
witnessing the vision,
experiencing the truth felt and fully known through the caress,
moving through something she could never put into words,
feeling immense energy moving through her,
flowing through her veins.
She broke,
feeling in the depths of her depths of her depths of her depths
finally
the knowing she sought after,
even when she had given it all up,
for safety in death.
In that moment,
everything made sense,
everthing came full circle,
she knew, greater and even more deeply than she ever thought she didn’t know,
that she was not alone,
that she had never been,
that she was the center of the universe,
the apple of the eye of Absolute Love.
The experience needed no explanation,
no justification,
no logic,
no rationale,
no sense.
The experience was complete in itself.
She translated the message she was born to receive,
the message she knew and had known, even in her not knowing, meant for her.
The ecstasy, the explosion of heart and soul did not etch anything onto her being,
they shone a light that the truth had already been sown into her,
into her cells,
her DNA,
her very being-ness.
She knew that the breath she took was connected to the breath and consciousness of All That Is before her body ever took its first breath.
She knew, she was alive,
not that she had been dead and brought to life,
but that she had always been alive, sacred, perfect,
and now, she knew.
She knew the secrets of her being without being able to put them into words.
Words were not necessary.
Words were irrelevant,
superfluous,
useless.
She was home.
After the years of wandering,
of painstaking analysis of how to live life,
how to be happy,
how to be free,
how to love and be loved,
after what felt like eons of disconnect,
separation,
distance,
she remembered,
she remembered the light,
she followed the light,
it brought her home.
she was home.
Part 2… maybe lol.
x,
I wanna know what you think