Alone Is The Loneliest Place to Find Yourself

I remember standing in front of my mirror. My soul heavy. My belly empty. My heart longing. I’d become different.

I breathed in deeply. I breathed in troubles and sadness. Grief was also caught as I vacuumed in rage and strife. Then I breathed out. I exhaled and my breathe seemed to stretch and never end. Like someone pulling a rope with my soul anchored to the end of it and when there was nothing left I sank to the bottom of a sea of nothingness.

Before complete darkness and emptiness, I saw a girl.

I didn’t recognize her smiling face as she held onto the end of the rope dragged out through the last of my breath. She seemed to be laughing. I could swear she was laughing out loud, but I couldn’t hear her. I remember because I wanted to laugh like her.

I really did.

“Have I ever laughed like that?” I wondered.

I wanted to reach out as she floated beyond me. But, I had no strength to lift further than the thought of reaching. I tried to stand on my tippy toes to get closer, but the idea weighed a ton.

Who can lift a ton?

I wanted to say something, anything to her before she drifted into the light leaving me behind in this darkness, but I couldn’t find my words.

What words could I have found to convince her to stay?

To save the girl she left behind.

A girl like me. Unknown to myself.

Who am I to save, if I am able to be left behind in the darkness and no one cares to scavenger through nothingness to find me worth salvaging?

I am only a stranger.

So, I watched her leave. Laughing silently out loud.

I know it’s a great laugh. So great, I sat in the peacefulness imagining how great of a laugh it was.

I imagined her snorting at first. Like a little piglet.

I even pretended hearing her laugh so loudly that it carried through the air into my ear and then into my heart. So humbling and amazing that it made me laugh until I cried.

Oh, her silent laugh…I miss it the most.

Then I remembered. I don’t know her.

Could we have met before?

Her face…..what did it look like?

Her eyes…..were they brown….blue….green?

Nose….wide…pointy….small or large?

How will I ever find her?

Ever know who she was?

Then I cried.

Oh, how I cried in that lonely darkness.

Alone.

Shaded underneath blackness where no one can find me. Where her laugher haunted me. Suppressed in sound. I gather what I can in memories for the sound of happiness.

When is the last time I’ve heard laughter?

I’m afraid in the silence. Sulking in my thoughts. Watching her laugh playing on a loop in my mind trying hard not to forget that happy moment.

Suddenly, a sound carried by a wave of hope poured into my ears, and into my heart and then into my belly, which now felt full.

Nourished.

I find the strength to reached out to her as she swam down into the darkness toward me bringing in the light, again. A ton weighed bearable pounds as I stretched onto the tips of my toes to met her face to face.

And still she laughed.

Yes, I can hear her. See her.

Her face…round.

Her eyes….brown.

Her nose…round.

I pull her close…into my body with my reaching hands and we became one.

Finally, her laughing stops, then she says, “Alone is the loneliest place to find yourself. There, I shall never leave you and here I will be with you….laughing.”