"You know who you are." -from the film Moana, lyrics by Opetaia Foa'i and Lin-Manuel Miranda
You told me not to post any pictures, because it would make you upset. I should have realized then, that you were not my friend. And I wish I'd known later, when you said as much out loud, that it didn't make me any less yours. Fidelity is the invisible sister to betrayal.
I think I understand now what horizons tell you and why the image is haunting. They whisper a secret you long to hear but have never stepped out of the boat to discover. There's too much space and not enough boundaries.
I know the feeling. When I was a little girl, I used to be frightened by photos of stars taken from outside the earth. It was as if the atmosphere of my heart was uncovered and I didn't know if I would survive without the pressure. These weightless glimpses offered euphoria borderline to fear and I couldn't decipher which to believe.
It is odd, one needs a unknown strength to hold infinite space where there is not even breath between us. What happened is, but might not, matter as we witness the light of the other piercing a void of darkness.
Nothing can separate us; it does, and yet revolution continues in an empyreal system. Another time around the sun may allow enough breaking of the dawn to crack stone; making belief where there is room. Here is more space at a broken table than the one you continue to clear and set. It is not the people that you believe are unhealthy, but what you're consuming. Making rules to guard eventualities of heartache or harm all the while denying your desire to live. You said you'd grown up, but don't you know an aging star eventually collapses inward? The light you're so desperate to give will eventually swallow you whole, as you stay in a place of security where even the photograph of a dream is too much to look upon.
What if I told you I found what you didn't know you were looking for, beyond the laws of nature we so diligently lived by?
To begin, speak your fears. Tell the truth. To the mirror, to your friends, to your lover, to your sisters and brothers, to your husband and your wife, perhaps even to the stranger in the street.
Some will accept. Another will question. Most choose unbelief and a few will receive you. The one you least expect may reject you. It is in that moment, as your soul falls unsupported, you will hit the ground. Hard. On hands and knees like a woman about to give birth. You will push and the earth will push back.
When you collapse through the scaffolding of a tower of safety you never wanted to build, and find in the dust that it is you. The real you is still there and the only thing that mattered and was truly alive. Well. Then, you let go. And get up. Feeling a love so big and wide your heart must keep breathing open to hold it all. In this space your dance becomes one that is not of survival but with the others you told your self to reject. We have learned to go barefoot amongst all the shoes that dropped and kick them off the edge of a world constructed without permission.
There's an open invitation to a place beyond belief.
"And the funny thing was that when all three finally lay together panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least tired or hungry or thirsty." -CS Lewis, from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe