Lost and Found

 

It amazes me

How many times

In the course of a fifth of a century

I have lost my way.

Of course,

There are times when I,

Quite literally,

Made a wrong turn,

But I’m not talking about that exactly.

The heart can trick the mind,

Convince it to join in on the game.

This is how I lost my way.

 

It started the summer before sixth grade:

 

My first kiss,

A game of truth or dare.

My first break-up (after only four days)

And someone waiting to gather the pieces and help me up.

 

I broke my first heart in seventh grade:

 

Surprisingly, mine broke too.

But I was beginning to understand how love and life worked

And found someone new to ease the pain.

 

I met a guy in junior high:

 

He was a high school soccer player.

He awoke new and unknown desires in me

And brought out a dangerous side I never knew.

I refused him

And he left me crushed,

Aware and resenting a completely new reality.

I didn’t know how cruel a man could be,

But I learned that summer

About a thing

People so ‘tenderly’ call

“A one track mind”.

 

In ninth grade I was a fool:

 

I was fooled into believing

That I’d found the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with.

Rocky, rocky, rocky.

His ship threw me way off course.

I almost drowned,

And clung to the first lifeline that presented itself.

 

The summer before high school my lifeline stole my innocence:

 

He took what I wasn’t ready to give

And then taunted me with it.

 

I started high school on a downward spiral:

 

I got into some unhealthy habits,

Cutting away the pain.

I lived inside an ice cold bubble, a colorless shell.

I went through the motions of life.

I even forgot how to smile.

 

This was the farthest off track I think I ever got:

 

I gave up completely for awhile.

I lived in a world where the sun hid behind the clouds

As soon as I stepped outside.

But life has a way of getting us back on course.

We are never too lost to be found.

We can only make so many wrong turns

Before someone stumbles into our life.

 

He stumbled:

 

Right into my path.

He was physically blocking my way.

It was the beginning of eleventh grade.

He claims he saved me from the bus

When I stepped off the curb to get around him.

(I still maintain I knew it was there).

His touch was so warm,

Foreign, yet comforting all the same.

He was the only one who could break through my bubble.

He was the one who helped me find my way.

 

Many years later:

 

But not too many,

(Only four…It was for dramatic purposes!)

He is still my steady and constant companion.

I may have been in a big cardboard box when he found me

Labeled in permanent marker “LOST”

But he always knows where to look.

He keeps me from making unnecessary wrong turns

And keeps me heading down the right path.