A drift

"How long are you going to hang out on that glacier? How many more years to cling to that frozen landscape you've called a heart?"

I'm floating, again, in the sapphire sea, adrift on my rock of ice. It's a comfort, this cold stillness that I can cling to, like the cool side of the pillow on a hot night. I come back here for solace, for knowing, despite knowing that there is no truth on this glacier.

It's melting. I've given it permission to melt. I've asked for it to be warmer, here, in this environment I call a soul. But as I watch large chunks calve into the blue void and leave me, I can't help but to be filled with grief. Less and less space is left for me to act out the old play. Old roles and actors leave gaps in the mental drama after they've gone. And as I watch another piece float away part of me accepts the departure, part of me screams with grief.

Yet another addictive facet of me instantly it melts into the warm, understanding sea like an ice cube in bath water. There it goes. I pretzel my self, twist stories and bend truths just to look good enough to get that measure that means approval. I just want to be in this whatever we're calling it today (friendship? relationship?) so that I can take the satisfaction I want. I'll exert whatever verbal calisthenics are necessary to come out looking justified and right. And now all 'needing to feel good about myself by what you tell me about me' all of the 'I'm nothing unless I can take what I want from you' chunks off with a base thud and a quake - gone. With it go the fairy tales of what life should bring to ME. Me me me wants someone to say "I love you" just once, wants someone to think about her before they go to sleep, wants to be right, just wants.

Want has drifted off. I'm left on an even tinier island of my ice. What will be left of me, now. What do I become now if I've hit the point of truly realizing that I need nothing from another person - neither sex nor approval nor cash - to be Who I Really Am. I was born to give, not to take. I knew this... KNOW it in my head. But now, taking it into being and behavior and saying yes to that truth feels like dying.

"Maybe that's ok. Consider that something has to die for something wonderful to be born. Without the disintegration of fall and death of winter no new seeds could be born into fresh growth."

For now I ride in the bluest ocean, clutching what remains. What remains? I don't even know yet what sediments lie under the surface of what's left. I shudder to think of what life will look like without these few old things to cling to. My shrinking glacier is a cold, hard and barren turf. It is a lie of a landscape. But, it's what I know. And when its gone I will be left in this big, empty ocean drowning in the sea of feelings. I will die. I will absolutely die.

"No. You will not die because you cannot be killed. Let go of the ice and you may find that you've known how to float all along."