Waking Ourselves

by M. Joseph Boehler

we are the brokenhearted; the ones who are awake enough to ache, who carry knowing like a wound;

we dream about our tomorrows, and romance our yesterdays until they bruise;

we bleed our days of their hours, spend feeling where it won't be returned, efforts evaporate, spending love on stone;

and somewhere out there others do the same.

we scrape our skin against the world's jagged seams and leave our marks like signatures;

while we drift, weightless among countless stars, bearing more than was ever asked of us.

Standing in the middle of everything, and looking back at the path that was never agreed to walk, yet taken all the same.

Silence arrives suddenly, between what was expected and what is. It wasn't cruel, nor kind. Just there. The way does not consult the traveler.

There was grief, a deep grief below the surface, not for what died, but for what never woke. Whole lives folded, collapsed, and dissolved inside a single decision, a single hesitation. The paths that shone in the distance, only in retrospect, lit by the retrospective glow. What is mourned is something else: a future that existed solely because it was imagined, then watching it disappear into the one life that actually happened.

How twisted, the mercy of hindsight, to invent ghosts, then have to bury them.

Standing there in the middle, standing and seeing a younger self; not with pity, not with bitterness, but with the tender recognition of someone who simply didn't yet know. That younger self had the responsibility of drawing maps with hands unseasoned.

The years behind were not mistakes. They were simply life. And life asks no permission, offers no apology, and leaves only the shape it carves: which is, after all, the shape of who we are.

Then letting out a deep breath. Not forgiveness exactly. Something much older. A letting go of fighting what already happened. Understanding that the river will never flow uphill, and the exhaustion of demanding it should; that is the real waste. It wasn't the unwelcome turns. Not the lost doors. But the years spent arguing with ghosts, arguing with what was already long gone and left behind.

What becomes of a person whose life doesn't turn out as they imagined?

Maybe they become, finally, the individual who stops needing to. And in that quiet, unglamorous, gritty surrender, something opens. Not a door, or new detour to what was lost. But a window onto what still is. A new view and greater knowing. For within us still beats a living heart. We are breathing air. We are still here, beneath the weight of our own rumination, waiting patiently for this window, waiting for ourselves to arrive, for ourselves to wake from some inner place.

What becomes of the person whose life doesn't turn out? They become the one who realizes the ghost they buried was never dead at all; it was always waiting for them to notice. The seat was never empty. The hands holding the map were always theirs. And the life that didn't unfold as imagined is the only one that ever had a chance to breathe.