There will always be reasons not to trust life.
Times when you look back and everything went decidedly wrong.
When you wished and prayed a relationship would work out and it didn’t.
When you set your sights on a big goal and couldn’t figure it out in time.
Moments when you swore you would figure it out in time… but didn’t.
I find myself at another one of those crossroads, the path lit with possibility, potential, and self doubt.
Doubt comes from believing you need to have it all figured out; as if you’re alone on this cosmic quest, and your agenda has no bearing. Life is not on your side, or worse.. life is out to get you. You make your plans and God laughs in his tortuous glee, how silly of you human, for finally believing you actually get to have the things your heart really, truly wants.
The most interesting part of not getting what you *thought* you wanted, is what you receive in the process. The paths you never would have walked down that start to feel like home.
Can you ever really tell in the moment which is which, or does the clarity always come in hindsight?
I found myself saying “it feels like I’m studying abroad in Europe” on a walk home from run club, the community I stumbled upon in Philly, in a city I never consciously intended to find myself again.
But alas, she blinked and before she knew it, she started to have a life again.
My life has felt like a culmination of those experiences.
Loss
Rebirth
Growth
Love
Rinse and Repeat
Even with so much change, the human instinct to control is still so strong. The desire to grasp onto the roots that are sprouting, the urge to overwater the soil, put the soon to be plants in direct sunlight and get details on exactly what is going to harvest and at what time, and for how long and in what order, threatening the very present moment that’s holding it all together.
Where does this desire to figure it out originate? Is it distrust from life directly disobeying your desires so many times?
When you had to cancel plans and felt like a failure?
When you left for study abroad and he decided things were over?
When the job you wanted after college fell through, and your Dad saw the disappointment in your face as you smiled through the tears and said “I guess I’m moving to Chicago.”
Now, you find yourself, wiser, in a completely different city, subconsciously tracing these similar yet somehow different sensations back to where they originated.
Parts of yourself you didn’t even know still existed have lit up again; parts that have certainly never been associated with safety.
A nervous system set ablaze, but you admittedly love the heat.
For so long, movement felt like the only option, this conquest of building and destroying so you could prove to the world that you were capable of being someone.
Creating the most beautiful spaces to tear them down.
Does it make you less than when you finally want to stop destroying? Or is that just how life goes?
Is it selfish to wish the timing will work out? Or has the timing always worked out?
Can the circumstances actually align? Or is that what’s happening in this very moment?
Is it even possible? Has it already happened?
Can you get cracked open in a good way?
You catch your reflection in his pupils and you start to remember how beautiful you are; not because of anything he said or he did, but because of what you said, and what you did.
“This feels like the equivalent of a cigarette” she says, opening a can of diet coke mini. A summer spent indulging, thinking 5 weeks was going to last a lifetime but with each minute that passes you find yourself wanting to find a way to accumulate more sand for the hourglass while simultaneously letting life do its thing.
For the first time in a long time, it feels like fate has not only been on your side, but she’s been pulling the strings this entire time.