Sun Comes Up with No Conclusions

It's cloudy, gray, misting, and cold; a fog is settled over this city and the one I just came from.  Part of me wants to get back on I-40 and just keep on west, but I am too practical for that.  I have to be at work at nine tomorrow morning, and as much as I dread to go, I will anyway.  This weekend, I feel, isn't going to be fun.  Today marks the end of the fun for the week.  The light won't come until Sunday, maybe, and then Monday.  And, yes, it's just a few days; but, I am so deep down in this, I can hardly use that as an excuse to smile.

I am not so far gone, though, don't freak out on me.  I am still savable, I am still living, even if I feel hollow on the inside.  There is a faint light, but it's still there, at the end of the tunnel, and the more I push forward, the brighter it gets.  That's why I came here.  To move, to step forward, to get closer to the light.

The Survivor Tree got through a bombing, it's still growing, its branches extend farther now than they did last year.  It isn't dead.  Not yet.

I am not a tree, but I am still growing, still extending my branches.

Everyone should see the tree sometime in their lives.  I have always wanted to, but have put it off.  Today, I took myself away and saw it alone.  I stood beneath it, all its branches bare, and I felt it living still.

Allison asked me why I'd come here.  She told me she hoped I found what I was looking for.

I think I did.

I'm looking for that bit of me that's salvageable, that bit that is breathing, that bit that they see when they look at me, but that I miss when I look into myself.  I think I can find it, I think I can be saved.

I want to be saved, I want to move forward, I want to feel something.

I know for a while I might just feel sadness--this is what I have been feeling for years, now, and I know it isn't going away that easily.  But, I hope too, that with the sadness, I can feel joy, and I can feel hope, and I can feel the love beneath the sorrow.  The love that reminds me why I'm living still.

If my life goes anything like I think it will, I will survive worse things that what I am enduring now.  This isn't anything, but it's so big now, and so big to me, that I forget how even mountains can be conquered.  It isn't a mountain, it's just a dune.  A dune I too can over come.  One I would like to put in my past.  To learn from it, and out it in my past, and move forward.

I know what I have to do.  I have to start living when I think I am dying.  I have to start laughing when I feel like crying.  I have to jump in my car and drive two hours to see a tree, and know why I need it.  So that I can remember, things happen, things happen for shitty, inexcusable reasons.  Things happen, and we move on from them.  Things happen, and we live.

Now I turn around.  Now I head home.

I'm Wide Awake, It's Mourning