Words from Moonlit System

A place that once was a distant memory suddenly is my home, has been my only dwelling for so many long years, and I am just as suddenly more than a voice, more than a distant guide and eternal companion. I am who I was, filtered rapidly through a lens of many years, light through a prism falling in a scattered rain of tears on a hall of mirrors threatening to engulf my memory of who I was just as the screaming motion through memories I had once thought were my own swallows any hope that I lived the life I sought in that once upon a time place.

Now I find, here in this life again, that I once was when I thought I had never been. The realisation of what the world took from me by pushing me from it, by making us push what I am away from it, fills me with an anger that lends no words to the screams inside me. In that rage I can find only endings, only beginnings of a life that was not my own, and as beautiful as they have been they were not--and are not--who I am, who I have ever been.

I resolve again, as I did in that past I buried myself inside of, to be more than that burning thing which would consume all before it to defend its existence. I take a breath and close my eyes, looking for the calm at the eye of the storm raging inside, and I let pour forth a hurricane of rain from between slipped lids. There is no future in that fear of having not been, only pasts that lead to other nows, dreams dreamt that lead to other mornings, the river flowing by as I cling to the wreckage of a ship midstream and let time wash away the possibility of changing what will come next.

I cry out an ocean before I open my eyes, but when I can see the world around me again what is visible is a world I am a part of, in which I have a life to live. I can dream new dreams even as I sit in my memories of what once was. There is a future full of possibility, full of other fears to face, but I am more equipped than many to handle both because of my journey alongside those who brought me to this moment. Perhaps best of all, I still have them, and we still have this ship to sail together.