Soapbox

Hello Out There

30 didn’t phase me, 40 was no big deal…
50, I guess, is going to be a bitch.

I really don’t want to go back
To those cyclonic days of my youth
Full of young dreams and lovely friends
But also young demons and fears,
Confusion and pain.

I was such a child then- looking back
I see so much sadness that I caused myself
Over things I thought I would die without
And the wounds, large and small, that I agonized over,
Watching them bleed,
When I should have seen how little they mattered.
How I struggled with things
That should have been simple.

But suddenly
That past seems so very far away that I feel panicked-
like a child who realizes she has strayed too far
to ever find her way back home.

It makes no sense.
I could not go back to the past the day I left it.
Why am I sad that I can not return
From 30 years beyond?
Loves lost were lost a lifetime ago
And love gained has outweighed them a thousand fold.

But I feel suddenly irrelevant, incidental:
Like nothing I do will really matter now.
I am blessed to have done so many things I wanted to do-
Graduation, marriage,
Children born, and loved, and taught
And now sent on their way
Towards that brilliance of young adulthood
Which I can still remember like it was mere weeks ago-
and yet, at the same time
It seems nothing more than a movie I once watched
Of someone else’s life.

Who was that girl?
What’s ahead for me, of me?
Mother of the bride, Grandma.
The nice old lady who hands out popsickles
On a hot summer day.
Nothing wrong with those
Except that they seem- I seem
So bloodless and empty
Compared to the razor-edged urgency of every day
When I was young.

Whether filled with pain or joy
They possessed a keenness
That I realize I have not felt-
not needed in years.
I want a warm spring breeze
To make me think of playing Frisbee
And dancing on the grass with my lover
Instead of the need to box up winter clothes
And pull up weeds.

Perhaps I’m trying to recapture who I was
Not from a desire to return to her
But in hopes she might offer some clue
To whom I should be now.

So many of the friends who gave me so much
are lost to me now-
Was I so busy with life that I had to just let them go?
I want to rap on memory’s window and shout,
Hello in there! Look around!
Appreciate these days, treasure the people
That you are lucky enough to have,
While I can only remember them.
Stop worrying about the future.
Enjoy your "now"
For too soon it becomes “then�?.

But the girl I was can never hear
The women I am
Trying, trying to get in.

And so I send out my messages in a bottle
To the ghosts of that missing past
Now living their future, as I am.

I have begun to notice the years shooting past
Like a comet pulled from orbit
And hurled into the void of space
That has suddenly noticed the lack of gravity
And direction.

Hello out there.
Do you still remember me?
If so…could you please tell me who I was?