One Sky

Earlier I was having a conversation with my husband about my birthday. The conversation was mostly about how last year's celebration was anticlimactic. My birthday was actually on the first day of student teaching, blah blah blah, but, that's all beside the point. What I'm really trying to examine here is that I'm going to be a quarter of a century old in about three months.

That's a pretty long time for someone who remembers practically everything. I remember my fourth birthday. That means I have approximately 20 years of memory stored in here. It also means I have a lot of loss in there. My mother told me (when I was about sixteen or seventeen) that I "carry my hurts around with me, and never let them go." Maybe I do. Maybe I don't feel bad about it. It's lead to a lot of excellent writing, eh? Yeah.

I'll be a little honest, and it might seem like "a lot" honest since this is a mostly unread blog, and--who cares if I'm honest, right? Well. I've had my fair share of deep hurts in my relatively short life. When I choose to love something, I love big, I love with all I've got, I love so much that it makes me nervous. I'm not just talking about high school boyfriends (of which I only had one, and I loved him relatively quietly) or pets. I'm talking about things you wouldn't even notice unless you asked me. I love The Book Thief by Markus Zusak so intensely that I read it at least once a year and I think about it almost daily. I have a favorite memory, of laying beneath a willow tree just a few weeks before I started college, and as simple as that moment was I want to go back there, every time I am overwhelmed or anxious.

And I have  had friends that were so ingrained into my daily life that I still remember them often, and then I remember that they won't speak to me, and I walk around all day wondering what could have happened and imagining myself talking to them and trying to figure out how those conversations would go. I don't talk about this to very many people. They think I'm being dramatic. My brother says that I "worry" about it.

It never occurs to other people that I actually love others so much that it hurts me to think about the fact that I've lost them. The smallest things are reminders of those best friends I had, reminders that something went wrong. There are people I've known that literally now refuse to speak to me, and do not acknowledge our friendship, and I have no idea why. No conflict occurred. We didn't fight. Our mutual acquaintances didn't fight. I just woke up one day and these people were no longer connected to me online, and they won't answer my phone calls. And that might sound dramatic, it might be overly sentimental, but nobody likes to be rejected, especially if they don't know why.

I have this other friend, whom I still occasionally speak to, and used to comfort me by reminding me that no matter how far apart we are we're still under the same moon. It was easier to believe when I was in the same timezone as all those old friends. Now I feel as if time and distance have caused some irreparable damage, and it doesn't matter what I say, the connection is just lost. We could be sitting under the same roof and these people wouldn't talk to me. Another 25 years might go by and I could see them in a church at someone's wedding, and they would just scowl, or look the other way.

Most of the time, this blog is about things you find. But tonight I just feel loss. I've lost something and it's likely there's no way of finding it.

I can't accurately say how I feel, and neither will this poem, but it's a start.

One Transparent Sky - by Rumi

Lovers think they are looking for each other,
but there is only one search.

Wandering this world is wandering that,
both inside one transparent sky.
In here there is no dogma and no heresy.

The miracle of Jesus is himself,
not what he said or did about the future.
Forget the future. I would worship someone
who could do that.

On the way you may want to look back, or not,
but if you can say, There is nothing ahead,
there will be nothing there.

Stretch your arms and take hold
the cloth of your clothes with both hands.
The cure for pain is in the pain.

Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both,
you do not belong with us.

When someone gets lost, is not here,
he must be inside us. There is no place like that
anywhere in the world.