her

As I sit here alone I keep hearing this soft voice asking me the same gut wrenching question over and over again. I don’t know the answer so I try to tune her out. She’s gentle and sad but cuts me viciously like a razor blade. It’s a familiar nagging voice that I’ve heard my entire life. Constantly trying to get me to listen. “what is it going to take to make you feel alive again?” The question has become more of a plea. Begging me to give her, her life back. The life she had always dreamed of but was never able to live. It’s Not that she didn’t have what it took to get there but I always held her back. The what if’s and the excuses always held her back. The timing the money, the fear. All of it crippled her and stifled her tenacity. It was slowly killing her until one day the motivational cheers and heart felt pep talks stopped the fluorescent dreams and neon ideas, they all went dark. She had no energy left to speak to me as she did before, all that remained was the one question I could not answer ..” what is it going to take to make you feel alive again” as much as  I was In her corner rooting for her, wanting nothing more in the world than to give her the life she deserved I was the one that murdered her. I was mourning what I had myself killed.  I miss her. I miss her relentless energy and her hopeful spirit. I miss the award winning motion picture like dreams she had often showed me. I miss her laugh, I miss her endless creativity. I miss her style and her sense of humor. I miss being able to count on her. She counted on me, and I let her down. I’m not sure what the final straw was. I don’t know what ultimately took her away from me. Was it the unforgiving curse of time? The inevitable veil that lifts from your childlike world to reveal a universe unmerciful and grey?  Or had she always been made up? A dream in and of herself that I finally woke up from. I use to be able to look in the mirror and see her, feel connected with her and be able to go about my day knowing we could take on the world together. I look in the mirror now and I see a stranger. It’s possible she made me delusional. She gave me the false impression that I was something so much more than It was possible for me to be. She gave me an imaginary purpose. I spent my whole life chasing something that was never attainable. She made it seem real. When she died all of my dreams, and aspirations went with her. Now I’m trapped in an unfamiliar lonely camouflage on auto pilot stumbling through the cold darkness. I’m afraid that I will eventually find a nice dark corner to crawl in to, fall asleep and never wakeup.

What is it going to take to make me feel alive again? It isn’t religion. I tried going back to church in my darkest of times, I was there physically but the lights were still out. I will always be spiritual but a cookie cutter religion and church rituals aren’t the easy button everyone makes them out to be. I’ve tried the crystals and energy healing and although they seem to play mind tricks with me and help for a time the heaviness of “life” always returns with a vengeance. When I was little I got sucked into the idealistic realm of fairytales and love stories.   Lifetime movies were like heroine to me. I craved them I wanted to immerse myself in them and get lost I wanted them to make me feel.I NEEDED them to make me feel.. I wanted to be a “leading lady” so badly I would emotionally “cut” myself purposely inflicting pain by placing my heart in a world that didn’t exist. I wasted so much time yearning for someone to feed me the lines I heard coming from the stars of the rehearsed life I so badly wanted to be mine . My expectations were always unrealistic and reality always had a way of reminding me of that when I was hurting the most. Through unrequited, unreciprocated, unrealistic love and loss I came to the self sabotaging, gut wrenching realization that that kind of love is only fiction, it only truly exists in worlds that we aren't able to physically travel to. It was created with a purpose of giving people hope. If we have no hope, there is nothing to hold on to. Likely the inventor of fairytales was a lonely soul grasping at princes and princesses to give them hope for love. Carrie and Mr. Big are as realistic as Ariel and Eric. We've been fed these hope inducing lies ever since we could communicate. When we were little we believed in Santa clause and the tooth fairy- eventually we grew out of that- we graduated to Disney movies and love stories I truly and whole heartedly believed fairytales existed and every princess had a prince destined to come sweep her off her feet, hold her hand and live a happily ever-esque life together. As years went by I realized that was all fake bullshit too. I matured into the “she believed she could so she did” epidemic. I swallowed The follow your dreams and make them come to life poison and I didn’t even need a chaser. Now that the spell has worn off I realize that was all a mirage as well. A coping mechanism just to get through life. I had my first real loss two years ago. The heart break is still fresh even though it feels like an eternity since I last spoke with him. My grandpa, my dad, my papa. I had more than my fair share of heart breaks. I was a hopeless romantic, it came with the territory. I was either madly in love or a crumbled pile of tears. I never knew what real heart break was until I lost him. A piece of my heart was literally taken from me. After that Things were never as bad as they seemed, things were never as good as they seemed. It was all just grey matter. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re all just on earth dying of a broken heart. It starts when your young. Little things cause small surface fractures, like losing your favorite stuffed animal or your first goldfish being flushed down to his final resting place. As you get older you learn about the pain of love and heartache, each break up chips away more at your heart leaving chunks missing, then you have to start watching your close friends and family suffer and cycle through life, that’s when things really start to disintegrate. Until one day you wake up and all your left with are crumbs and fragments of what once kept you alive. That’s the day your heart is left with nothing to beat for…so it just doesn’t. With every breathe I take I’m getting closer to that day. I don't think there is anything left that will make me feel truly uninhibitedly alive again. If you find something that makes your heart worth beating for, hold on to it for dear life. Its the only thing that will save you.