Metamorphosis

The days are going fast now.  So fast I look in the mirror and I see the fading light of my design casting shadows across my face.  I'm still here inside, though.  This girl.  This little, young, adolescent, preteen, early 20's girl.  She still lives here.  But her face... her face is changing.  It's morphing and seguing into this unrecognizable shadow of the girl.  The reflection in the mirror is not the reflection in my soul and I wonder if the face knows?  Does the face know I can't relate to it?  Does it know it's a stranger to me?  The face... the face becomes it's own entity while my mind tries to catch up.  It can't.

The face, the body, the joints, the back...they change.  So hard and so fast.  But the soul.  The soul is relentless in its endeavor to remain in its most reverant state  Pure and open.

Growing older is a virtue.  Becoming wiser is a gift for which we are not entitled and few receive.  But no one told me when I was 22 and in love with the night and the aging jazz pianist at 54 and Berry that one day I would lose the ability to care.  To really care about a thing.  That someday my passions would be displaced by the utter harshness of life and that I would feel absolute desolation at the lack of joy life sometimes brings.  Oh, please don't get me wrong.  There is joy.   There is plenty of joy everyday.  But it is not the same joy of my youth when I conquered my days with nary a thought beyond the night and the stars or this beautiful person I am sitting beside at this dive bar who is offering up little gems of his soul for me to devour before we part ways.  There is no more excitement about spending the day in leisure and not knowing or caring even what the afternoon might bring, maybe a movie, maybe a nap in my bed with a good book, maybe a study session at the library for an exam, maybe work.

Your vision, it changes as you grow older.  All of the parts are still there that make up who you intrinsically are but the stuff on the inside, it changes.  It just does.  It is as inevitable as the sun rising and setting.  You can't continue to see life through the same lenses you wore when you were 25.  You need new glasses.  Your vision changes.  If you are lucky, it changes for the better and creates in you a unique perspecitve on which to view your new world. 

If you are unlucky, you go in mourning for the you that is no more.