Sitting here, watching you wake up and fall asleep -you don’t even like to sleep, we are similar in that way- I can only feel. Not think much, but feel. What it has been about you, about me. What you’ve given me introduced me to and hide from me. Who you’ve turned me into and how I became the me that I am now, without even realizing it, knowing it. How you grew inside me, settled in me and how I absorbed it all; filtered it sometimes, sometimes resisted it until I learned to say yes or no.
When I thought you were going to leave me -and yes you played your games sometimes-, and believed that I’d never find you again, I always had that feeling on the back of my neck, that ticklish warm touch in my breathing which ran through my body and shine out of my eyes.
You taught me moments. To understand them, to cherish them and to let them happen to me. Breathless ones, complicated ones, delightful ones. Sad and angry ones: the ones that I wanted to hit the wall or throw my always-big-and-heavy-for-my-petite-size-bag at something- unfortunately fashion snobs and magazines judge me for my choice of bags.- Countless and sometimes indescribable moments. When the moment passed and the high was gone in those, I was left to deal with the feelings, with that rush or saddling afterwards: How to move on, pass it along, add those to other passages. I learned how to heal or hurt sometimes.
I met you at the corner coffee shops, under the traffic lights and during subway rides. Some nights you were there with me playing Wii at a friend’s house -obviously me constantly winning! - Over cooking dinners or on a bar stool with strangers. I dated you at a concert, in a chick boutique trying to find the best dress. I rediscovered you in an art piece that I watched for hours trying to seek answers to my questions. Some days your presence was in my apartment after a long work day with a sketchbook on my laps, a magazine on the couch and a TV show behind the lid candles lights and a diet peach Snapple sitting on the coffee table. You were real, vivid, as alive as I am and as true as it could be. I was transformed by you and with you.
I resisted you at the very beginning. I resisted you so much that I had even blinded myself for a period time. I didn’t want to make my reality yours and didn’t want to see yours. In my defense, I had no defense. I guess it was self-protection. Perhaps my ego –oh the biggest enemy of human kind-. But what I was protecting myself from had nothing to do with you, it wasn’t about you. I was only putting up those safety guards of mine because I was scared. Mostly scared of the things I could do and losing myself.
There is no end to happiness, to new experiences, disappointments, heart aches, new visions, falling in love, out of love, panic attacks, chocolate, tears, and laughs. No end to any beginnings. There are no limitations, to how one can feel, live, indulge and share. No finish line to learning. Because life goes on, moves, accelerates, descents, but never pauses –there are time outs though-. Life grows, branches out. Letting go is a part of it. It is a part of life when you need to, when you have to, but letting go isn’t forgetting. Neither replacing nor erasing. Letting go is just freeing you from that fragment or emotion. Letting go is sometimes while moving on, grabbing that feeling, blinking moments, your past-present-future, putting it in a thick skinned balloon and hiding it deep inside somewhere between your heart and soul.
That’s exactly what I did. I hid you in me and every time I need that uplifting, dazzling, and breaking the bonds energy and every time I feel lost, I let the balloon out a little, and wherever I am, I inhale that. I smell you, absorb it and walk on as you’ve always shown me. It gets easier because I let you and myself free.
Missing keeps love alive. And that’s why even if I cheat on you with other places; you’ll always be my city of blinding lights…
-it’s not where you’re born, it’s where you belong-
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