I have been running through the squares of foreign cities in the gray of the shadowy nights.  Knocking on doors of perfectly random strangers, who answer in languages I have not known, but have felt desperately reminiscently familiar.  I have been running from this door to that banging and pleading with them to help me find; recover the things…sacred, which have been lost, misplaced, plundered, and at times…given away.  With controlled, breathy screaming, expressing to them my urgency through shaking hands and wine splashed blouses soaked with tears.

 

“ Can you help me find myself?” 

 

 I have compromised, exchanged, lost…pieces of my soul…to absolutely no avail.

 

As the sun glared in my eye on the car ride home from places so dark that light simply could not exist in them…It dawns on me that I have been banging on other doors…because I have been afraid; terrified even to see and know and face what lies behind my own. 

 

You see, I have been attempting still to make my life, my answers, and my world perfect.  Still pulling bumpy linens over dirty bed sheets.  And I have become again to myself, intolerable.

 

 There are no heroes here.  Any capes that I might have once donned, I ask that you allow me to to remove with tentative candor.  As they are, of late…strangling with intense purpose the scant light that is warring for internal ground. 

 

So I sit, on cold foreign cobble stone, head hung low, finger nails jammed with yesterdays dirt, feet throbbing from the 4 inch hills I have hobbled around on all night.  A foreigner in my own mind and heart and soul.  

 

I listen to the clapping of my heels against the chilly pavement.  In motionless time, I pass the aged faces of those who have drawn the permanent boundaries of social expectations, and forged through methodic reaching for pain remedying masks ;a chasm.  I whisper to them “ I’m sorry that you are here, and that you hurt and that you have not found that which you so desperately searched for.” 

 

There are no heroes here.  Only human beings attempting to find our ways. 

 

A few months ago, I was visiting with friends and overheard my girls and my friends daughter talking.  One of the girls was upset and the other asked, “ Well, what would make you happy?”

 

I sat chomping on the deliciousness of that thought for the next few minutes…days perhaps.  Realizing…I didn’t have even one answer to that brilliant, potent question…until just now. 

 

I want to go home.  It would make me happy… to make my way home.  Home, not in terms of a place as much as the space of being where my soul is present and whole and I am true to myself. A place where the doors of acceptance are always kept open.  A place where there is freedom to be, and where in that being…there is still great love.  A place where…there are no heroes with perfect answers…just humans doing their best…just us…being. 

 

…I’m ready to go home now.  I want to go home.