One day you're going to wake up to one of your favorite songs playing through your headphones and breathe. A deep, clean breath instead of the short pants of trying to keep your head above water. That breath goes deep, lungs expanding fully, body tingling with the return of oxygen. The fog is beginning to lift, the water calming, your feet finally under you upon solid ground.
Passion returns, filling the gaps in your days. Stolen moments, late nights, pens dropped along the bedside as you fall asleep -- fall asleep when you'd want nothing more than to stay awake and create. Early mornings when you used to crave sleep, crave that escape from a life that, at times, still feels odd, like visiting a foreign country that speaks the same language as you. Off, but in some intangible way. You can navigate, and understand what people are saying, but are missing those familiar touchstones of home.
But home is in the music you listen to and the friends around you and the things passed down from mother to daughter. It's in your loud laughter and sarcasm and delight at developing a new skill. It's the small messages that make a big impact. In the eyes of your dog and the hugs of your family and how you still have that hole in your heart, a hole that can never be filled (but oh, have you tried to fill it with cookies and sweets and bad TV) but isn't the night sky full of them? Full of gaps and foreign lands and darkness?
No. It's full of light. Light we see because of the darkness.
And as the clouds clear and the fog lifts, you take a pen in hand and find your passion again and oh, oh how you've missed it.
Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of
your life.
Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly
dash with your hair.
- Walt Whitman
Copic markers, multilines, and white gelli roll pen. Doodled in church, spell-corrected with help from friends.