Rebirth Into Self: The Journey Home

There is a sanctuary set aside from the world, a place where dreams are laid, goals actualized, beginnings created and endings accepted. This is a place only one person knows the location of, and that one person is every person, for it is a different place within and without ever individual.

No person lives their life without going through a transitional period of time where they "find themselves"; something akin to returning to a home you didn't realize you had. I'm lost right now, and I am found, and I am traversing the mental distance between the two vantage points, omnipresent as I watch myself every step of the way.

Somehow, a moment we shared is guiding me back into myself. It’s as if the warmth held within that moment emanates from a soul sleeping inside me in a place I can’t remember the path too. I follow it, this feeling, not knowing where I am going and though I easily lose my way again and again, I feel its heat upon my back beckoning me to correct the path I’m forging through my mind. So I turn and continue on into the darkness we created, we shared, we reveled in during that mixing of souls that was the catalyst for some sort of metamorphosis we struggle through, moment by moment.

This is not a peaceful journey nor is it exciting or mysterious, it is nothing but pain and fear. I have lost who I am, who I was, really. I am no one at this moment but a creature trapped in a fathomless chrysalis of soulless soul searching. I’m thrashing about in my mind, trying to find some remnants, some pieces of who I was, what I was: child, daughter, mother, lover, self.

Something within me broke, something has let fly all pieces of my personal mosaic into the wind rushing by my mental cadaver over the cliffs of insanity into the sea of mercurial consciousness. Even in this storm I feel that warmth, glowing unseen yet felt from somewhere across that rocky sea. Throughout this whole time, at the very edge of my mind’s peripheral vision I see myself battling to break from my encasement, too stubborn to realize it’s too soon.

There is no other recourse but to dive into this sea of what should be self, to swim amidst its waves, its tides, its depths to reach what is beyond its shores. So I jump, clutching what few shards of myself I think might be worth, diving into the sea. I struggle through this empty ocean feeling bumps and slitherings of things somehow existing yet unknowable. They snatch at my legs and drag me down only to push me back up into the crashing waves and the slapping winds, and rain draws red rivulets from my skin.

Then suddenly, it is as if that universe within my mind compresses and the sea itself is forced into me, condensing within me through the cuts the rain carved and a barrier crystallizes around me, hardening until I realize what I kept catching at the edge of my mind’s eye was self fulfilling prophecy.

So I fight and struggle, suffocating within myself, choking on a sea of my own creating, drowning in that stinging salt water. And when all resistance has proven futile, it all goes dark, darker than the storm, darker than I’d ever known.

I wake to the sound of an arctic plain cracking, thunderous in voided space and I am sloshed out of the protective barrier that me while I was formless. Droplets of consciousness fall into the form of words, structured within their seeming chaos around me. I stretch my limbs and test my lungs, newly born into that which I am from the essence of what I was. My skin thickens and hardens, slowly as I adjust to this new form, the first and only barrier between who I have transformed into and the world around me. I must strengthen this body, this mind, this self before venturing from the birth place of my mind back into the world.

Then, for the first time, I notice the warmth about me and realize I am in that place I strove to find, that place you and I created within one another. It is here I have found myself, within myself, imbued with some part of you as well, some mystery that quickens my blood in my veins. I remember what I have come from but it no longer binds me, those ties have been cut away by your demanding beckoning and that prison burned in the heat of those moments that haunt us still.

I do not know who I am, I do not know what form I take, but I am reflected in your eyes at night, in the honesty of the moon’s gentle light and I see myself for the first time: home and whole in your eyes.