A few years ago, someone told me I was the strongest person they had ever met. As they spoke, I began to question in my mind everything they said. Strong is the last word I would ever use to describe myself, the more I questioned the more I realized that I had an untouchable aura about me. Though at heart I was welcoming and warm I was also private and distant. I could pull inward at the drop of a dime, tuning out the world around me without hesitation. I also realized that to her, I appeared to be firmly grounded in who I was and what I was about but that was far from the truth.
If I am to be truly honest, I have always been fixed in a state of flux, bopping back and forth between doubt and assurance. My days are often filled with shadows of longing and my nights, whispers of yesterdays. I have never been able to dream in the normal sense, when I close my eyes, I drift into profoundly vivid and oftentimes tragic scripts. I daydream to compensate for the hopelessness that sleep often time brings and I write to release its grip. My greatest desire is to truly live but unless I forcibly catch my breath by looking up and out, I find myself drifting through, existing. On the outside for some reason others see a rock, solidly rooted, unmovable, unshakable, sound. But in reality, I am but a grain of sand caught in the gust of a windstorm. My fear is not the fall once the wind stills but rather what follows the landing.
