Musing #1

A Moment of Madness

In the beginning, there was absolute darkness. I was in that darkness, lost to a world to which I did not really belong. I didn’t belong in the way that I had hoped to, anyway. Like I mattered. Maybe I didn’t need to matter, not in an important sense, but metaphysically. Do you know what I mean? I’m not really sure that I do.

Somehow I had to find my way out of that darkness, but I couldn’t see the light. Not the way that I should have seen it. It was all such a blur, not just because of the darkness, but because of what the darkness meant. Did it have a meaning? There was something about the darkness that mattered, that made me feel insignificant. In the darkness I had lost myself.

Back to the beginning, in that absolute darkness, I reached out to hope but couldn’t grab onto her. She was there, and I could feel her presence no matter how elusive. Purposely elusive. Like a tease. But I wasn’t amused. I was desperate — to escape the darkness, to find my way to the light. It had been too long since the light had smiled on me, too long since I had walked in the world.

I couldn’t say for certain why that was, why I couldn’t escape the darkness. Not only did I feel trapped, I felt unhinged. I wasn’t myself. I was outside of myself, outside of my mind. Immobile. Frozen in a time where I could not be, where I could not live. Not in the way that I had hoped to live.

I was tired. Exhausted, actually. There was a heavy black weight in my chest, intense like the darkness that surrounded me and pinning me down. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I felt nothing.

Blinded in the darkness as in the light. There was no way forward, no escaping the deep local pain clamped to my heart. There was no way to describe the emptiness that overwhelmed, or the utter sense of loss — loss of self and no longer certain of who I was.

And that left me searching, searching for a why to life, to this [my] life. That was when the light shone in … when I began to love myself. When I embraced the passions and attitudes that drew me closer to myself, when I no longer clothed myself in others’ perceptions of me, I could, finally, see the beauty surrounding me.

At the beginning again, there was light, and I was in the light, with a new song in my heart as glory filled my soul. Oh, what a glorious day!