Late Night Drives and Salty Eyes

I can't help but to feel a familiar pull on my heart on nights like these. Where the moon is full and high and smiling, the air is crisp and alive, and I fall in and out of love with every breath. I guess all of this hasn't hit me, this leaving, this growing up, these changes. Instead, they come as taps on my shoulder at unexpected times. Tonight, I was tapped. Tonight, the night which begged me to come lie down with it for a while, got up abruptly. Tonight, I cried.

It feels damn near impossible sometimes, this being alive thing. I don't mean it in any hard way, I just mean that the every day hard work of it feels like so much sometimes that it seems almost an odd relief to get caught up in the ordinary things. The showers, the work, the tv, the driving, the errands, the dailiness. But, lately, the dailiness holds no secret sanctity for me. I find myself struck with long buried questions during the most ordinary times. While driving to work, while in the shower, while standing in line at Target. Some little darkness knocks and I feel a little unprepared to embrace it and invite it in for dinner. To shine the light parts of me onto the dark parts of me. And so instead I nod to acknowledge its presence. I let the question come full into my conscious, but that's all. I don't try to answer it. And when tears tempt my eyes, I stay steadfast to all four parts of me that are false stoicism. I try to believe I am hard and strong.

But, it's all for naught, because I know I'm not hard and strong. In fact, all the while these deep and fearful questions have been striking me, I find myself meeting the tender parts of me. I find myself often moved deeply and tearfully at the pain in the world. At the suffering. Even when the suffering is my own. I sit quiet and on my own exploring the abandoned roads and veins which bring me to different, old, same, new parts of my heart. I find myself slowly sinking into the truth of my tenderness, vulnerability, fragility, and not finding it a weak fault. But, all that has left me also feeling unprotected when it comes to those questions which are best faced by false stoicism or lest crying for days.

And, deep down I know. My heart is full, but there is an empty ache that all this tenderness is pointing me too. An ache past my heart where I daily find new wounds from the wars I wage and are waged around me everyday. Sometimes they're solider wounds, and sometimes they're just wounds of a person at the wrong place at the wrong time. Scrapes, bumps, bruises, brokenness. All these beckon, beg, for healing. And I find myself strangely silenced. Strangely stoic and impersonal, objective even. Or perhaps just passive. Everything is pointing me to the same place. All the questions have the same answer, my whole life is a magnet back to my Abba, but I find myself trying to hold myself together, when it's so obvious the whole point is to fall apart.