Intraflection

I miss the person I was before my last relationship. I remember looking forward to car rides and the empty space it would leave for words to tumble, excited, hopeful, breathing life into the cold air inside of the silver sports car. I miss the beauty in my own obliviousness, my eagerness to share the thoughts that collided and bounced around my head, the lack of care I had for the judgment of my respondents. The abstract idea of wondering aloud. Contrasted with the reserved and thoughtful person I have become, I wonder if this is partially due to maturity and less to do with individual constriction. Though often, I am constricted. I spend my daylight hours mimicking adults in a workplace that feels like home and also a stage I am acting on, never a toe out of line or a hair out of place, resilient and smart and quiet. I thought these might be qualities I was in tune with but now I see the error of their conditioning. When do  I get to strip myself of these chains, walk barefoot through wet grasslands and call out to only the sun as she burns above me, grateful for the opportunity of life I have so selfishly wasted in the years prior. I wander through cities and mountains and airports and cafes and never seem to find the perfect timing, the perfect reasoning, the duty to continue on this subliminal mission of hope. I miss the child hiding in the walls of the home of my head. I miss her wide-eyed wonder and ability to solve any problem in the world, as long as it presented itself honestly. I miss the way she made love, timidly and thoughtful, scared of sudden movement, and inspired by any attention given. She was so honest, so beautiful; though at the time I was convinced of her hideousness. The mirror looked back to me in contempt,  no shirt folded over her body the way it was supposed to, no pair of lovers eyes erased the pain of that reflection, as if arrows stuck from her arms and legs in all of the space she wished to take up less of. She apologized frequently and repetitively for the body she owned. Although I miss her, I do not miss the confusion of others’ love validating the things she grew remorsefully into. The black sticks lining her eyes always seemed to break, the lipstick to melt, the paint to fade long after a day’s end- and how could others see her this way? How could peers and coworkers and friends and strangers look upon her face and not see it for what it truly had been- hardly alive? Could they not see passed her mascara smoked frame the sadness in her eyes? Could they not infer the paleness of her skin to the sallow belief the sun never had wanted to kiss her the way she desperately needed? Could they not recognize the brazen disregard for her own well being, even when this being was a repetition of a deadly dance beneath a moon she did not know to be her own wrongdoing? How can I walk beside feet that do not remember which path they are choosing, how can I talk to a mouth that cannot grasp its own language? I have longed for a person who exists within me who I have never met yet always feared. So I blame the relationship of physicality and human connection rather than the one I have observed to the truth of my own self, the relationship I inevitably revisit though it never developed to be in the first place. In my mind, I am but an abstract thought, floating in a mobilized unit of decay and loss, I bring forth only the trouble precedented in my belief and the loss found in my action. I am a holy mission of which there is no beginning or end, there only is. This state of purgatory often reminds me that I am only a fragmented idea in a chain of millions. I will wake up one morning and eat fruit from the wrong tree, I will recognize this action, and I will be no more. Simple algorithms are as easy to understand and difficult to process, as a child I believed myself to be as immortal as a blink of light in the sky or a promise of sunrise the following day. I have learned these inclinations fall from our hands like shattered glass the moment we realize our body, our thoughts, our souls as they nearly lift from the physical temple to which they are enchained. If I am lost it is because I chose to leave the path of safety, if I am guided it is because I have chosen to find my way back to the safety of familiar gates. I tumble out of myself so often and so fruitlessly it seems more impossible to rebuild myself than it would be to leave the dusty remains fractured in the alleyways of these breakdowns. If I confine myself to any such idea, it is only because that morning I saw a small swallow, flying in and out of broken tree limbs, who landed on the cup of my coffee and stopped me from the thinking processes I cancel before they even are born. He tells me stories of a sky filled with clouds, so lovely to dip below and around yet scary to venture through. Although I know it is nearly impossible for a swallow to fly this high, his words comfort me in the way a blanket might comfort those suffering from illness due to the cold. Teach me the humility of wings, teach me the brazen escape of flight, teach me the joys true awakened thought can bring to the mind of those who have never known her.