Do you trust yourself to make it to the next exit ramp on the road of life?
Directions.
Passing every mile marker I find more I have passed over, missed, or lost to the mysteries of time.
Perhaps I should start at the beginning.
Or maybe I already have. I'm not sure when the beginning is. Birth was a beginning. Death was a beginning. Relocation was a beginning. Ends were beginnings and beginnings were endings to beginnings before. When did I begin to measure the stretch of road on which I now travel?
One more toy soldier falls and one more rises to take its place. Are people so cheap that we can replace them so easily? We move forward. It is the only real choice, but how well do we handle the moments in between?
Perhaps I should start at the beginning.
Things are jarringly incomplete, but this seems to have become the recurring thread of my life. I taste wine without really swallowing it. When I swallow the wine it becomes a poison. Difficult it is to understand, but when I travel through the crossings on the road I set something off and I put change in motion. Yet, it doesn't always impact me directly. It is not supposed to. My vision is always meant to be left jarringly incomplete.
Perhaps I should start at the beginning.
I had a vision once and I lost track of it. I became overwhelmed by perceived failures and dropped into chronic depression and eventually suicide. My death itself was jarringly incomplete. I went all the way over and then came back via my own decision. The reasons for my decision were based upon being told about, and then visualizing, events that were yet to come in this frame of reality. The events I was advised of happened, much as I had anticipated, and then they came to an end. The riddle didn't make any more sense after the pieces had been played. The riddle itself was a model by which I was meant to learn how to play out my own life. I was merely visiting.
I still haven't started at the beginning.
Losing faith in yourself is the greatest crime you can commit against the soul. Not just doubting yourself, but completely losing faith in yourself. I had dreams I decided I was not good enough to achieve. There were things I wanted to see happen that I believed never could be. I hoped and prayed for change but none came. I was not able to inject anything into the dreams and thus they eluded me. I failed to realize that I needed to act in order to succeed and that things would not come to me.
Never lose faith in yourself.
Everything was rather bland at one point early on in my life. Other people were outlining my life and all I wanted was to become a published writer. How odd that seems now as publication remains rather unimportant. Writing is merely for self-discovery now and I still intend to write the novel I was meant to write. It just no longer matters that it is published. I used to need to have others massage my ego. Now my ego is so damned huge that massaging it causes it to go into cardiac arrest. I am here to set the stage for my next journey. This one may have already played itself out. I remain to solve one mystery. It is all that really matters to me, aside from all those damned people I try to help and impact from time to time. I have to find what has been lost.
This will be the hardest thing you will ever do.
These were the last words spoken to me while I was still on the other side. I wasn't sure what they meant. The hardest thing certainly wasn't coming back. I came back stronger and with the ability to do things I never could do before. My faith in myself with restored ten-fold. Leaving everything I knew in New England and coming to Florida wasn't all that hard. There were those it was difficult to say good-bye to, but the operation went fairly smoothly. Following the signs and locating the woman who spoke to me in the dream that followed my death was strange but not all that difficult. Playing things out the way they were predicted to happen wasn't all that hard. Even losing my job, my car and all my money wasn't all that difficult. I walked and fought and battled my way back to solvency. It was actually rather amusing trying to survive. I lived in a bus station for a while. What could be the hardest thing I would ever do?
The emptiness.
When I came back there was a mandate, to find someone and to make contact with them and to follow the signs that took me through a series of lessons. It was an adventure greater than any that movies or books could have brought to the table. Everyone who became involved understood in a strange way and helped me by giving me everything that they could. Then it ended. The end credits rolled and everything was the way it was supposed to be, a comedic tragedy with its own life within a life. Once it ended I landed in a fairly mundane job, which I have now been at for more than three years. The visions and dreams stopped. I began working with a group of talented and creative people on a television show involving puppets. I got married. Everything felt rather ordinary.
Ordinary life feels more like death to me than anything I've ever encountered.
The visions returned several months ago along with the vivid and disturbing dreams. The images came slowly, as if testing the waters to see how I would react. Then they became more concrete. I saw death and destruction all around me and people in pain. In death I had seen a river along which people suffered and died. In life the dreams give me a city in flames with people fighting each other to survive. The dreams also gave me back the cabin in the woods where I once saw Tina, the woman who guided me to Orlando. She has left the cabin, she is no longer relevant, but the lesson of the cabin remains. It has a new occupant, a face and form most familiar to me. I don't have to ask who she is, but she is missing. She is nowhere to be found, swallowed by the mists of time. She cries out to me and wants desperately to be found but I don't know where to look. And now I must decide whether to commit all the strength and energy required to find her or to continue with the ordinary life I have become unhappily comfortable in.
I have to find my wings.
My decision may require them.