~Jungle Squirrel~

How can I go home again? A place of least resistance, but little more than mere existence.  I walked the million miles of the information highway looking for something. Flashing lights and glitter to attract and distract the emptiness inside.  Looking for me and something to satisfy a hunger I had denied myself for so long. Finding things I never knew existed.  Am I finding them or are they finding me?

I feast on them with the veracity of a jungle cat, wanting no others to share in my spoils, so I can come back and be satisfied again and again.  I fear what happens when the carcass is clean.... Will there be another kill when my hunger and desire compel me? Will I survive the emptiness between meals?

How could I not know how bad I needed this?  Needed to know me.  All of me.   Excitement, heart pounding, blood rushing, a euphoria of pleasure.  On this journey, I'm falling in love with me. And once you have learned to love yourself, how can you take that love away again? How can you love yourself by day, and yet deny your heart that love by night?

What is the fairy tale? The one that pleases the senses in the depths of my soul, or the one that pleases the mind in the depths of my morality.  A struggle between flesh and logic, pleasure and pain.  The flesh is denied in fantasy, so why does it feel so real...? How does it become the truth when it only exists in my mind....and on paper?  Yet the logic which is real, flesh and bone.... it is laced with denial. Denying the pure hell of my reality, foolishly thinking that which surrounds me could someday, somehow, get better.  Thinking such things was nothing more than a fantasy. Where is this line I crossed when fantasy became the reality, and reality became a fantasy? How can I go home to a lie?

But how could I live in a fantasy.... Loving myself.... Stepping outside my own skin, if even for a brief moment, thinking my skin fits me so perfectly, it would be easy to step back inside.  Yet that is no longer the case.  It is no longer home to me. It no longer fits.  I no longer recognize her. That woman bound so tightly with denial. Denying my mundane existence.  Denying desire. Denying the acts of rejection and aggression. But I don't yet fully know the new woman staring back at me in the mirror.  Who is she and why is she taking my hand and guiding me into the frightening world of the unknown?

I ask myself, who do I love more? The empty lifeless skin, OR the nakedness beneath, raw and exposed, vulnerable, needing a home that fits? I don't know yet, all I know is that I have no where to go, no where I call home, no skin that fits....so....

 

How could I go home and still love myself?  I can’t.
There is no going back, to that other person, that other place, to that lie, to that slow death....

This thing.... This stranger.... She is all I know now....as I do not know how to put them together and make them fit seamlessly.  Will I choose to take her hand, leave that shell behind and walk these streets, journey this highway, naked and free to find what ever it is that I am searching for?….Yes I will.

~S~