The True Shot

Do you know what is beautiful? The reality of change.

You can be so woven into something; so incredibly tangled so that it becomes a place of calm and happiness, but to be severed from this web of complacency: to be capsized so that you are gasping for air, your head underwater.

Vivid? Yes. Brutal? Perhaps. Necessary? Certainly.

I did just that: was severed, I pulled the natural turn over; I choked, I sputtered and still I refused to call for aid. I kept it pent down inside of me, letting it eat away at the fringes of my heart, steadily gnawing it away until solely the bones were left.

And then, as if something had knocked me over the head, I was able to let go of my anger, my frustration, my utter agony. I was able to see through the water, finally understanding which way is up and which way was down. I was able to start again, finding the materials to rebuild bits of me that were strewn about, too destroyed to use again.

I was able to finally open up, cut a small door in the iron curtain around my life so that people would see who I really was, not the mask I put on every day.

I was able to understand what it meant to love myself again.

And in the search for forgiveness I stood on the brink. I had rebuilt much of the town with a few necessary buildings still in the making: I had houses and grocery stores, but no police station, no post box and no tube station.

And in the search for forgiveness I stood on the brink. I had opened the small door so that people would be able to put their eye to it, glimpse around inside and perhaps see the darkness that swirled: but every time the door was opened, a small part of the blackness would escape, leaving me feel a little bit lighter.

And in the search for forgiveness I stood on the brink. Finally I had realized what I had instead which was better and more promising than I had seen before. The blackness was ebbing away and I was starting to understand what it meant to rip down walls of cinderblocks and concrete and stone and iron. I was starting to reopen my life. People were starting to see me for me again.

And in the search for forgiveness I stood on the brink. Then I found that I wasn’t alright with complacency. I wasn’t alright with going through life wondering ‘what if?’. I approached the night and searched for forgiveness.

I was taken down a few notches and to begin with I was deflated: as a beachball that has been sitting in the garage for the winter, waiting for the first rays of summer to come poking its head through but once the garage door opened, a ball no one would find but rather a slim disk of malleable plastic.

But then once I realized that I actually did not care was the moment when I really burst through. The change took control of my situations and moulded them to the brilliance they entailed. My wall was on the down-swing. I was finding peace. I was finding genuine understanding.

I was finding me.