Up Until Now
I live the life I’ve always dreamt of. An apartment in the city, in a walkable neighborhood, with a job that is more than secure. I pay my own way to live. I have books stacked around my apartment, my little gallery corner with my plants to keep me company. I make tea before bed every night, and I blast music as soon as I wake up. I lay in bed at night and I realize that my dreams never made it beyond this point. I spent so many years of my life just surviving that my only dream was to get to a place where I would be able to come up for air. Have my space, and my things, buy the groceries I liked, rewatch my favorite reruns in peace. But what now? Where do I go from here? I only saw up until now. I can’t seem to detach enough from the “whats next” mentality that haunts everyone. I want to stay present, to remember this apartment, to remember how I am today because frankly I like her a lot. You wouldn’t imagine the years it’s taken to be able to enjoy my own company. I look back and I realize how much things had to be hard, it’s not really ever a punishment, but an undoing. If you’ve ever seen a ball of yarn get tangled you’ll understand where my mind is at. Life is like that. A ball of tangled yarn, just waiting to be neatly wrapped up, to then be later knit up into something beautiful, something useful, something purposeful. For as long as I could remember I felt so tangled, so confused and lost. Not to say it’s any different today, but today I have some clarity on the value of life. On why it’s worth fighting to be here against all odds and especially against yourself. This season I’ve been learning to just wrap up all of me into a neat little ball of yarn. This is the part where I learn to take my mess and wrap it up, where I allow things to be placed where they belong. The past in the past. The old me with the old me. And the future me yet to be met. The mess can’t go on with me to what’s next, even if I don’t know where I’m off to. All I know is that I need to wrap it all up for the knitting to begin.