Loss Awakening

Looking at loss it always felt far away like it belonged to another so I decided this meant I simply wasn’t bothered.
Now I wonder if it was simply that it felt like, seemed like, nothing at all belonged to me.
Was I even a valid entity?
Tossed about on the waves of other people’s choices, people I did not know how to move away from, people I did not know I was allowed to be apart from, their choices were my direction
I didn’t know I was free
My being tied down by ropes of obligation, fear of retribution, fear of being found out
Determined to hang on to determination, to not drown, despite the repeating 100-foot waves
I drowned but did not know it
Every tiny intake of air was, to me, enough to breathe – just
In it all my mind and body simply went off-hire
Though my heart was awake, I could not see myself, I could not feel anything other than determination
Here I focused even when I was lying face down on the water
Until the day another storm came – one that blew me toward dry land
There I lay unconsciously breathing grains of sand with the cold morning air
The ground beneath me, an unfamiliar feeling seeping through me until I felt it
A consciousness spreading over me, through to the core of me
With it one question, and one loud sound of permission
“What the hell happened?” and “I do not have to….”
Stay
I do not have to wait for the attached to tell me they are okay with me moving
I do not have to ask
I do not have to and all those who told me otherwise are lost in their own storms and do not know my truth, I barely know my truth
It’s not lost though
Despite its distance, my truth is coming to the surface and making its way to the shore
Piecing together the extent of my losses, making sense of the picture and story they tell
In full agonising technicolour – rather than black and white remnants of what felt like another’s life, it is now becoming clear, becoming fully mine
And I choose to look and to feel it, despite the pain running through me, I must look and acknowledge what I see, for it belongs to me

naomi sarah