Something To Say
If I'd been awake for just a moment, at just the right moment in 1994, I would have gotten off a Greyhound Bus in the middle of Denver, Colorado. I would have gotten a job and worked for awhile. I would have walked that city, just the way that I did, only just too many years later. My heart would have felt it's place and known it's space.
But I didn't. I was very ill that night and I stayed on that bus and I slept. I slept most of the way for another thousand miles. I stayed asleep and the chance disappeared without me even knowing it. Before I even knew the dream existed, the chance to fulfill it disappeared.
Seven years passed before I saw the light that would have guided me forward. By then it was just too late. Or so I imagined.
But still I prayed over this thing, this dream that was something I had never envisioned. I knew it was improbable, maybe impossible. My life was so broken and flawed by that time that I couldn't imagine how I would fix it enough to convince myself to even hope to fulfill such a dream.
I prayed. A thing I hadn't done in years. I cried and screamed and crawled. I suffered over a dream that I didn't know how to believe in. I begged and for a few months I waited.
Then something terrible happened. It wasn't a sign. It was a warning. Life was short. It was too precious to waste waiting. I made a plan. I made a decision. I fixed this dream in my heart and I wouldn't let it go.
For one solid year -- a few months more, really -- I held fast to the dream. I searched for the things I prayed for -- a pathway, a light, a sign, a goal -- something that would tell me I was doing the right things, that would tell me the dream was within my reach.
I received nothing. No light. No clue. Only more darkness and confusion. I wound up in Denver, so many years too late and for a moment I thought I knew what I was meant to do. I could see and smell and taste it.
Then, and I promise that I am not kidding, I was hit by a truck. Literally. One second, one half-second in time and I would have died.
Still I struggled. I fought to stay in the city. A city that I felt a connection to, that I felt some real possibility from. But it wasn't possible.
Days after that fateful accident I was on another bus headed to California, a place I was sure was the answer. I spent days traveling the coast and wound up in Santa Monica.
I walked the beaches from Malibu to Venice. Sometimes alone, sometimes with other people. I walked and a I wondered and I cried. I cried a lot.
I was somewhere familiar, but I was lost. There was so much time between what I dreamed and what was real. Finally, I broke my own heart, trying to rid myself of the dream that I was now sure was insanity.
I did things that I would never have done. Did them because they were something to do besides reaching out for something incomprehensible. I did things that were against my heart, anathema to my soul, because I wanted to put the dream behind me and because I had to change my life, somehow.
I had prayed for strength and patience and ability and in the end I gained none of those things and instead I lost all of myself.
I have crawled through the last nine years of my life. Crawled with a broken spirit and a shattered heart. I have tried to forget the dream, but it still haunts me. I think of things that I might have done, if I'd had the strength, the insight, the patience. Even now I find things that connect me to the dream. I can not escape them. They are everywhere.
The life I'm living now is not one I should have ever lived. It's as if I stepped out of my own skin 9 years ago and into someone else's, someone I was never meant to be. I know I can't undo the things I've done. I can only start again.
But to do that I have to take a hammer to this life. I have to break it away from me as if chiseling myself out of a stone tomb. I have to change everything. That means doing what I did before, only with some meaning this time. Not trying to escape from something, but fighting towards something. Fighting to get back to myself, my real self.
