“Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.”
-Chinese inscription cited by Thoreau in Walden

I haven’t stayed up late in quite some time. Keeping late hours used to be second nature to me. But life alters and thus you must alter with it. So, late nights have become a luxury. One I am engaging in now, because tomorrow I am granted the gift of unalarmed slumber. I sit here in my hug of a bed, enveloped in the blessed thrill of clean sheets. A simple joy that I have been able to appreciate since always.Today was not an easy day. I woke up to disappointing news, accompanied, ungraciously but quite ceremoniously, by dreary and daunting clouds. I knew this news was vastly approaching, but nevertheless was unprepared for it. I reached for my phone in attempt at a lazy plea for comfort and found myself seeking that comfort from a man in whom comfort was personified. The oddness of this completely un-calculated emotional maneuver is that his comfort hasn’t been mine to access in quite some time. No, I haven’t been anything to him in quite some time. {I was not always kind to him. I always thought I was.}

The low brontide of thunder, again; and I love it. It is frighteningly alluring. I light all my candles and put on an Audrey DVD and the night is mine. On a night like this, I am remarkably talented at being alone. Right this moment, my eyelids are imploringly heavy and I am betraying them by evading sleep but I need catharsis…

I feel like I’m stuck in the deepest, most unforgiving abyss of lostness with no ladder, no map, no compass, no direction (home), no hope. I truly don’t know where to go. When I write, I feel more myself than when I’m doing anything else, except for praying.  If there is anything to which I can attest, it is to the panacea that is prayer. And yet, i have all but abandoned it. I write and write, because I am desperately trying to connect back to myself, without having to be accountable to the author of my existence for the blank pages I’ve accumulated.

It is in these numb hours that I am susceptible to self-inflicted emotional autopsies that are more revelatory than anything else ever could be. I scalpel the intricacies of my being and what I uncover terrifies me. My grasp right now is tenuous. I struggle to be true to myself more than I wish to admit. This self-actualization undulates within my chest and the coldest corners of my brain and I want to sink into nothingness for a little spell and stay there until someone can arrange my future into patterns that make sense and construct me a map and then tell me what the first step is to pulling myself out of this unrelenting deepness.

I know how I want to seem. I want to seem idealogical and pleasant, vibrant and intelligent and feeling and charming and aware. I want to seem giving and righteous. I want to seem self-assured. I want to seem those things because I want to be those things. On some days I am one or two or three of them. On some days I am none of them. I want four walls with joyful living and humble remembrances inside and I want a strong, protective tree in the back yard, or front yard, that provides just the right amount of shade. And I want to read underneath it’s branches.

But that is not all.

I want to saturate my life in all that is lovely, all that is sound. I want to hear a piece of classical music and know its name and its measures like I know my own skin. I want to be well-read (not just because I’ve read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books) and know by heart the most beautiful lines ever written in the history of literature. Like, “you happen to me all over again” and “how she listened, the first time, to the sonorous lamentations of romantic melancholia echoing out across heaven and earth!”, for example. I want to be able to recite them with the same familiarity as my own name. I want to not just appreciate art, but know it; sympathize with it. Once, a long time ago, I saw van Gogh’s “Irises”. I had read his biography the fall prior and thus was able to recount where he was and what was going on in his life when he painted it. I loved the significance that came from knowing that. It humbled me. Goethe said, “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words“, and that truth echoes to my bones. The days that I seek out those realms feel the most worthy. It is dichotomous that I feel most grateful for and yet at the same time most encumbered by the time that I am given. Grateful, because it is a generous gift. Encumbered, because I am a spendthrift. The irony of all this is that I have no one to point a condemning finger to but myself.

I want to be the kind of intelligent that makes other people think differently. I want to understand what is important, and I want to always be learning about the world and finding new ways to understand it in all it’s living complexities. I want to be intelligent enough to appreciate differences to which I don’t relate. Indeed, and in deed, I want to “be the change I wish to see in the world”. I want to never for one breathing second take for granted my ability to envisage.

Above all, I want to never forsake that part of me that yearns for closeness to my Maker.

And so I bid farewell to this night on bended knee and with bowed head, hands clasped together as if they are each other’s only hope. And in silent and earnest fervor I plead: “Please help me get back to where and who I need to be, I beg of You…”

Peace and Love.