Wake up, I'm calling you.

Sometimes I look around at my new life and suddenly feel all alone - a desert rose, a grain of sand on a planet of nearly seven billion people.  I look out my office window and see the beauty of nature, the wind rustling the leaves, the morning dew watering the grass, the ducks sending ripples across the lake, and the clouds dotting the sky.  I know I’m part of that whole cycle of being, yet I feel disconnected behind these window panes.  I’m shadow; invisible. It would be easy to fade from this world, become a ghostly image of me, hiding from any and everybody until I’m forgotten, like a gravestone that has faded, broken, overgrown and unreadable.  I’ve faded and been forgotten before, left behind too many times not to fear its sting, so I close my eyes, and let the pain trickle out with every tear.   

My soul inside shakes hard against my heart and cries out, “Wake up, I’m calling you.”  The song by Eye Alaska fills my heart and my mind.  I can hear it clearly; my body gently sways to its melodic beat. I can feel the passion and desperation in the words; words my soul cries.  “Get up, they’re mocking you.  I thought that you were the one who would make it all on their own.  No?  I tried so hard, you’re asking.  Wake up! I’m only asking the obvious.  I tried you once, but you won’t wake up.  I’m only asking what could have been. I knew back then you’d never …fly.” Just as the words fade, I hear my soul whisper, Don’t give up.

Why do I hide?  What am I searching or waiting for?  Sometimes I’m so numb I feel like a block of ice; hard, cold, emotionless. Other times so passionate I’m about to melt from the fire; one that without a vent of release turns inside and consumes me.  In those moments there are no arms to warm me, or no lips to receive mine.

I could fill my life with warm bodies, my bed with human flesh, but my soul yearns for something more.  I’m not sure who is the greater fool, because more may never come.  “We all are almost certain we’ll never find why we live and we die. It’s a question with answers.”  Is my soul right in its fear that I’ll never fly?  It is what I’m born to do, and I’ve removed the lid from my crystal cage, yet I still find myself hovering inside this glass jar still looking out at the world, petrified to be free.  What if the wind won’t carry me?  What if my wings are not strong enough?  What if I get lost and don’t know where to go? What if I die?

To my soul I cry, “I’m waking up, please help me.” My wings are delicate.  To barely touch them would destroy them; to not use them would destroy me. Don’t let me fade.  Don’t let me die.  Don’t let me sink back into the dream. I may not have the strength to stir next time.

Till next time,

~T.L. Gray