◎ Like a Night in the Forest

This morning I was listening to music on the way to work and I got caught up swooning to a playlist I made last year. All songs about love, seeking, wandering, memories. I'm quite pleased with it, honestly, because it's probably the most stylistically and thematically consistent one I've made, and I continue to enjoy it. If I wanted to I suppose I could arrange them to create movements, but I generally listen on shuffle. 

The reason I bring this up, though, is partially in response to some thoughts I had last night, that came upon me while I was falling asleep. Nowadays I don't mind at all-- it's akin to a ghostly child coming to ask for a glass of water, but then to walk away thankfully never to be seen again, when addressed properly. Most of my earlier posts here were such glasses of water. 

But I was thinking about what it feels like to reach, and to be reached to. I remember that when I converted I had said that my experience with Christianity was the first time I'd ever felt like something reached for me, after years of reaching out and getting no answer. I think I have that sort of impulse in me in other ways, too. Reaching for love and affection in my youth, having my desire to be loved taken advantage of, and finally learning my own value but reaching where I know I will receive no answer. And now I am in a liminal space, where I am safe from harm, but I am also starving for affection and love that I have only ever wanted to share. 

For whatever care I have learned to turn inward, which is much, and to my benefit, the idea that every need can be outsourced if only one is clever enough is simply not true. Moreover, it is grinding in the soul to try to deny when you have a person-shaped hole in your heart that even God cannot fill, because it is not His shape or purpose. And when you have a soul-shape that you want, however impossible, you can't even try to shove anyone else in, unless they're smaller than the shape you really want. And so... You sit in limbo. 

But as I listened to the music on my playlist this morning, I realised that songs like Annie's Song, which held my attention in particular, were written by people for their loves. By men for their loves. And I thought suddenly, as I occasionally do (though it hardly sticks), about what it would feel like to not be the person who wrote, the person who sang, the person who reached-- but the person who had such things written for them, sung for them... the person who was reached for, and somehow shone in someone else's life so brightly as to eclipse others... And somehow it seemed fantastical, miraculous, and hardly possible. In fact, I found myself feeling frightened that I wouldn't know what to do with such a thing, or it would simply be to fool me. What a disappointing scar. And yet... somehow acknowledging such a sprite, and giving her a glass of water, made me feel slightly more hopeful, and timidly open to such a possibility, maybe someday, even outside of fantasy.