Cranial Chaos

I often wish I were a better storyteller.  Written or spoken, storytelling is a gift.

As it is, I am given to abstract.  I can maybe paint a small picture with words, and hopefully in doing so, expel some of those words from the swirling mass inside my head. I could write non-stop about most any topic, and can be passionate about many of them.  Sometimes I wonder why I don’t write more often, even if its just for me, and even if its just to purge the excess thoughts.

But these days there is a sense of suffocating anxiety.  It’s not stress per se, but this growing sense of waiting.  Waiting for what?  The feeling is gradually building and causing not a little internal confusion, making me mind-numbingly pensive and very distracted.  All of a sudden, I feel like I’m living inside my own head.  

There is something in my gut that feels like its more anticipation than anxiousness, and that I’m waiting for the coming of some moments of pure joy; that unadorned, weightless feeling of happiness that can only happen in bursts because to have them last any length of time would leave one trembling and vulnerable.  I can sometimes snatch little pieces of this feeling, like plucking fireflies from the damp summer air, and make every attempt to be conscious of them when they happen.  All of these, I get from natural sources too.  It helps if I close my eyes and sense them, rather than see them: the delicate sound of birds on a crisp spring morning, the smell of the air just before a June rain and the warmth of the mist clinging to your face after it.  The unexpected laughter of your children when they’re unaware you’re in earshot.  A smile from a stranger that reminds you you’re visible and that we’re all human.  

These moments do more than just make life bearable.  They feel like a premonition, or like little instructions meant to show you how to open up and be capable of letting the good things in; or reminders to simply notice those little fireflies.  But in turn, it makes me nervous, to think about the bigger happiness, because you can only lose something you possess.  

Deep down I feel maybe that I’ve needed to get to this place by trial and error and that I wouldn’t have been capable of fully grasping the importance of this thing…this whatever it is I’m waiting for, without wallowing in the dark and becoming intimate with solitude.  And I’m scared, even still.  Scared that it’s all in my mind, and that my imagination has finally pushed me over the edge into semi-reality, or even made me crazy enough to be half way between eccentric and lunatic.  I have become so good at alone, have had myself convinced for so long that I prefer to be alone, that I fear the intimacy of almost everyone.

And especially the someone.  Because that’s where the anticipation reverts back to anxiety.  I have waited for so long to get to the point in my life where I can focus on finding myself, when my children become independent of “mother” and go down their own roads, that I cannot help but feel uneasy at the realization that instead of “me time”, I may be faced with something entirely different.  My belly clenches every time I think about it, but I can’t help it.  I believe in that overpowering, undeniably human, stuff of stories from the beginning of time.  I believe in that complete trust, and in the seed of intimacy that once sown, grows and flourishes between two people that meet in that spot of mutual openness meant for only them.  I believe souls can speak to each other, through lingering looks and gentle touches and shared strength.  I believe that two people can love, and suffer, and celebrate and grieve and do it as one.  I believe in true love.

And also, I believe one day I will have my own story to tell, even if I only tell it to one single listener.