Life Got Small
Sometimes I wonder how my life got so small. I wonder where the days went, how a lifetime went past in a blink. I wonder if other people feel this way, or whether they know something I haven't figured out yet.
I wonder if this is what grief looks like - the isolation and stuckness while the rest of the world carries on. I stare into a comfort flame and take my mind away from reality. I live in stories, constantly reading or watching my timesucking TV. I live my life away from the real world, stories have more to offer me anyway. I can fight dragons, rescue fairies and find the killer in stories - I can have adventures. The real world is nothing but a job I don't enjoy and an empty life with global horrors trying to grab my attention. And so, I carry on living in stories.
A few years ago I moved to a Welsh valley purposely to escape my past and start again. When I first moved, the valley healed me in ways I couldn't have imagined. In Wales there is an abundance of mythology and stories waiting to be discovered, and it's been easy to lose myself in them. Lately, the valley feels small.
Where I live, there are around me what feels like a million waterfalls - tiny, small and large, each with its own unique character and charm. Their flow speed changes each time that I walk by them. When the weather has been particularly harsh for a few days, bucketing it down non-stop, more waterfalls appear as if by magic, allowing the excess rainwater to flow and curve its way down the mountainside, scurrying on its way to freedom somewhere else.
There are different versions of me, the me I am happiest as is the me who walks up mountains, who stands in the trees and looks up. Thinking about nature and things 'bigger' than me has been my one constant since I can remember. At age 5, I asked my grandfather why we didn't fall off the earth as he walked me home from school. At age 16, when I had one of the hugest hangovers of my life, I spent hours sitting on the grass in a field next to a train line, watching the natural and human worlds around me, just thinking. The exposure to nature readied me to face my father's wrath more than anything else could have ever done. I still remember the peace I felt sitting in that field, it helped me put my 'armour' on.
As much as I have learned about the world since, I still have moments of utter awe when I look at mountains and contemplate the vastness of time and history they have witnessed. This makes me feel my tiny place in the universe. I imagine the stories that could have occurred in the mountains, I make up secret fairy dwellings in the trees whilst I'm waiting for my dog to stop sniffing on our walks.
I don't have any roots, and I have never been 'seen' by anybody. Except for my daughters, I have lived life alone, externally and internally. However, loneliness is not the correct term for the feeling accompanying me throughout the world. The closest word to describe walking through life 'unseen' is emptiness. I feel like a waterfall, constantly scurrying my way to my own kind of freedom, hoping I get somewhere else.
I see the resilience in nature, adapting constantly to changes in its environment. To me there is a duality between nature and humans of combined resilience, acclimatising throughout history to the changes thrown at us. Change can be terrifying, scary and exciting all at once. Sometimes, change rushes at us like an unwelcome visitor arriving on our doorstep; other times, we invite change in, wishing for a different life. The one thing we can be sure of is that change is constantly heading towards us. The only change in my life recently is that it got small, the change I need hasn't reached me and I don't even know what kind of change I want, except to stop feeling empty.
I used to think a person's bookshelves told you who they were, but my bookshelves would tell you who I was. I am not that person anymore but I haven't found the person I'm becoming yet.
Maybe people like me live in stories because the world is too much and it's so hard to ignore. There has to be people like me, those for whom everyday life is an effort and nobody knows the truth, or maybe everyone else has it all figured out.
