Have you ever felt lost without knowing you were lost? Days seem to pass in too much of a blur and it takes everything from you just to make it through all 14 hours or so of the day. Your mind is a never ending checklist as you complete tasks here and there. As you finish one excruciatingly long day you can’t forget, there’s always more to add to tomorrow’s list. You’re so busy you don’t even stop to look up; to look around and notice how far you’ve wandered from the comfortable things you call home. You’ve been on the road for so long you don’t even know when things started to become unrecognizable. It’s been so long you even start to debate if it’s worth it to turn back at all. You have a whole life out here in the big bad world. But it’s not whole, you haven’t been whole for quite some time. And yet, even though you’ve known that fact for some time you haven’t allowed yourself to totally analyze it. Because to do so would throw away everything you have now. Your routine, your inertia, right in the trash. You can’t stop, so you won’t. I think we’ve all felt like this and had this internal, secret dilemma with ourselves before. Sometimes it can feel as if we’re ghost, just drifting above the Earth. But what happens when, without even trying, you snap out of it and your two feet are suddenly firmly planted in the ground? One day in the blink of an eye you’re in some far off distant land and in the next second you’re back in the place where you come from, your homeland. One second you’re surrounded by people that were once strangers but now familiar and the next you’re sitting by a fire. It’s the same fire you’ve sat in front of your whole life, hearing the same stories you’ve always heard from the same voices always speaking them. The same children run past you, sisters chatter beyond you with friendly smiles. You’ve known their smiles as long as you’ve known your own. You are home. You know the scents in the air and the sounds in the skies. You know the lands behind you and in front of you. You know the Earth itself as well as you know the back of your own hand. Everything feels right, everything feels like you have a place that fits perfectly within the balance. You belong. I am trying to describe a soul tribe without saying the god awful cheesy words that immediately discredit my work to any skeptic reading this. But that feeling which is so vibrant within me, vibrant enough to paint this perfect image, is what I feel. I feel as if I am unequivocally and irrevocably home. And though my actual life has not changed, I have. I used to think I had only found this feeling once in the warm, hazel eyes of someone long since passed. That I was doomed to forever feel alone in the vast and empty space which is this world. That loneliness was so big it sometimes felt like a statue casting a constant shadow over me. But here I am writing that the statue has been demolished. Not by any one person, certainly not another set of eyes which see right past my skin and into my soul. No, this feeling has now come from within. And for that I think it is more special. Suddenly I look in the mirror and I don’t see a girl who is all alone, suddenly I see a girl with a personality and secrets which I must unfold. I see someone I truly want to get to know right down to the marrow of her bones and the spark of her soul. I see a girl who is worthy of a friend and of love and she sees me right back. She sees me for all that I truly am and I see her. She is my best friend, my long lost sister, my other half. She is me. It all sounds so silly when I say it out loud but when you’ve been so disconnected from yourself for so long, you forget that you are a whole other person in your life worthy of all the love and attention you give to other people. And honestly, why do we put other people ahead of ourselves in the first place? Aren’t we our first priority? I don’t know… to me when I look in the mirror and see the blue eyes of my reflection and I want to be there for her, and she wants to be there for me too. Who better would understand me, laugh with me, love me and inspire me more than her? I shall spend time with her, get to know her as an old friend, learn her laugh and what makes her truly laugh as opposed to the uncomfortable kind of laugh. I shall learn her ins and outs and fall in love with her as she has for other people. Pay attention to how she bites her lip when she starts to get stressed and work immediately to comfort and soothe her nerves. Listen to her stories intently and hang on to every detail. God I want to know everything about her; what secrets have I been keeping from everyone including myself? What does she really do to enjoy her time? What are her true hopes and dreams, does she truly react well under pressure and distress? What really makes her happy when she’s not being a people pleaser? All the things I would ask and test other people on to really get to know them and yet I’ve so rarely done that with myself. I am hers and she is mine, and my first priority from now on is to her, to myself.
Mystic River 