FINDING THE LIGHT

<center>FINDING THE LIGHT 

<center>(Moths and Butterflies)</>

Here we are, waiting and watching... waiting for that moment when you leave us and watching you fold into yourself and disappear before our eyes.

For the past year, I have known your leaving was coming. I've seen your face slowly taking over my own and cast an eerie shadow beneath my eyes while the lines you once drew between us form deep furrows I can't ignore.

Day by day, I have struggled to remember what day it is while witnessing your inability to recall what you had for breakfast, what you were doing an hour ago, my name...

While you were falling, I was barely hanging on; we were both oblivious to the other but I was keenly aware of each moment as it slipped past me. I wonder how much you were aware of. Are you still aware? Are you still in there?... in that frail, hollowed-out shell you once danced in?

We did dance. We danced in the face of all the emotional pain waiting for us when the music stopped.

That was then. That was so long ago. That was yesterday, wasn't it? Now, you don't dance anymore. I don't remember when you stopped hearing the music.

Who will I dance with now? It would seem that I'd be used to dancing alone after all of these years. I hardly noticed that I had become a solo act, yet here I am spinning on my own private dance floor.

The time has finally come that we will see you spin your chrysalis and fall into your deepest sleep. I have no regrets except that we never understood each other. It makes sense now – you are the butterfly, and I am the moth.

Or could it be the other way around? It seems we glorify those who go into metamorphosis before us while we dishonor our own.

All of the misunderstanding, anger, resentment – it doesn't matter anymore. Time has chewed up the past, swallowed it, and left us with nothing but the bones.

That seems to be what is left of us as well. Love exists in the bones. Love is finally exposed with what remains of those layers of our experience. So much of it is nonsense anyway.

Regrets? Perhaps it isn't regret as much as it is wishing we had been wiser then.

I am wiser now. I am watching. I am seeing you without the façade. Unadulterated. Honest. Pure. Perhaps I should strive to see myself this way before expecting others to see me so vulnerable and in need of validation. Someone should validate us from time to time to let us know we are... real.

We are just human beings with human lives and these strange emotions hewn over the years into the stone walls of our own creation. Maybe we are 'just' human beings. Maybe not. Or perhaps we are just pubescent moths and butterflies,... both headed for the light.

M TERESA CLAYTON