la sombra es tuya

There are few moments in life that have the quiet yet brutal ability to completely transform your perspective on life, to make you see the truth in yourself. Few because these are the ones that actually leave a dent in your soul, that razor an indelible gash using fate's serrated edge that eventually heals despite leaving a rather jagged scar with that indescribable rare color of purple that changes with time, sometimes darker, sometimes more pink and sometimes if you concentrate really really hard fade and disappear into a soft, misshapen, but...soft...memory imprinted on the map of your soul. Forever. Moments that can feel like decades and sometimes are. Moments that overlap into a field of confused and contradictory emotions, of visions recorded through rose colored glasses made permanent over time due to fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of the light. These are the moments that in the present are nothing but inocuous seconds passing but in the past play out like a Shakesperean tragedy being performed on a stage with you cast as your very own foil. We've all lived through these moments and some of us, I'm sure of it (aren't you?) relive them each night as we try to catch the tip of the moons of sleep and rest while replaying these moments again as if we were the director and could now rewind, edit and replay. The truth of the matter is that regret is sincerely the epitome of waste, of senselessness and of self loathing. There is no end scene command and there certainly is no option of ad libbing or any understudy that could possibly recreate these moments to make them less.

It's only when we become brave enough to reconcile these moments, to file them away in the dusty old cabinet hidden away somewhere in the back halls of our yesterdays that we can actually escape the hold of their grip. Then and only then can we see the light overcoming the dark, blinding us in every way and still allowing us sight we've never experienced previously. Terrifying, sad, lonely and at the very same time comforting, joyous and completely whole. Only then can we be liberated from what was or what was only in our field of vision skewed by the blinders of our hopes. Brave because it takes chutzpah, real cojones to see the truth. We can be lost in our own portrayal of the most perfect performance for years, decade or 12 years as it were. We become consumed with the vision of happiness, of family, of being someone who is loved, who belongs to someone whom they love. The lens of our heart acts like a filter that we manipulate willingly yet seemingly without intent of disillusion to paint the most wonderful Rockwellian scene exactly as our brushes of hope would dictate, sweeping delicately and carefully across the rough, timeworn canvas. The shapes seem so real, so detailed in every aspect especially color and light, love and promise. But like any practiced painter knows, the truth is under each stroke, each layer of color blending into the next is gracefully covering up the old and adding to the wear and wisdom on the canvas. Once that lens is removed, shattered and left by the wayside, the scene is drastically different, dark, tragic and glaringly opposite to the image we had emblazoned in our heart. The play has fooled us. The hero has become the villain. Or maybe it's the other way around. The falling action is actually the climax. It's not what we expected, it's not at all what was written in our playbill.

It's at this exact moment that we suddenly are reborn, recharged, awakened by the anticipation of the next act, the next line, the next stage. The preceding acts become clear as nothing more than yesterdays and nothing less than our shadow. Those yesterdays are seen now with crystal clarity devoid of any filters, lacking any rose colored lenses to brighten the darkest of times. We see our yesterdays for what they were, a patchwork of imagined bursts of conditional happiness, sewn together by the threads of our tears, our disappointments and our self deprecating impulse to settle. The painting we had masterfully constructed becomes visible now for what it always was, a temporarily decorated canvas fueled by brushes whose hopes and dreams are still alive but will paint new colors and create new moments solidified with truth, with the purity of love and kindness and free of the rose colored glasses never to be worn again. Because life itself is our most arduous, most exacting director. It will bring you to your knees, it will crush you beneath the weight of its plot twists and tragedies, but if you stand back up and keep moving forward, take that story a little bit farther well then you may just realize that you are your shadow but you decide how it moves.