Footsteps on Concrete

It's about feeling myself firmly on the ground. After a week of head-spinning, cough-rattling, bleary-eyed head cold, all I want is that feeling of my two feet pushing on the sidewalk. I walked a lot this week. Before the cold set in, but also during, and tonight I can almost say, 'after,' because I think it will be mostly gone tomorrow.

I owe a lot to the people around me. My family is far away right now, too far to look any of my relatives in the eye and tell them how I feel. Though I never considered myself especially a family-type, I miss that closeness. Without the unexpected warmth of the friends I have made here, I would not know how to begin to express that feeling. What is your family but the people you invite to share your life with? I have a family growing out around me now, from the people I live with to the travelers who sleep on my couch for one night and I may never see again.

I believe you can learn something from everyone, especially the people who you find it hard to even bear being around. And when you start feeling squeamish in someone's company, it can often be a sign of insecurity on your part. Sometimes people mirror our worst side back at us, and it makes us cringe. But it's not really the mirror's problem if you're having a bad hair day...

If I duck around trying to avoid all the mirrors, my life becomes a maze of frantic evasion. I find myself coming home and avoiding meeting anyone, just going as quickly as possible to the shower, to my room, or back out into the world where I am anonymous. I guess it's clear that all that is a sign of not being ready to face things in myself. I am running away from the possibility of seeing my flaws, or what I imagine to be my flaws.

This week I tried to sit still in front of those mirrors and see what they actually show. It was so uncomfortable. I even wound up with this cold, which coincided neatly with my admittance that something has to change in the way I am living my life (not the things i do, the way I do them)-it wouldn't be the first time someone's manifested physical symptoms for emotional tension. Yet despite the discomfort, the intensity of peering into other peoples' eyes and seeing myself, humbled and simpler than I like to think, I felt again that buzzing joy of life this evening. That feeling of savory vividness that's so tangible it could almost be another entity;

You now what I'm talking about?

It starts as a smile in the corner of my mouth, and then starts to yank a string connected to the bottom of my stomach as it curves up my cheek into a grin. There I stand with a smile and a belly full of butterflies, for no reason other than...fill in the blank-I felt the wind on my legs in the warm evening; I shared a smile with a stranger; I thought of a sentence that made me laugh out loud as i scribbled it into my notebook by the Rhine. That is all I want in life, to sometimes cross paths with that entity and embrace her.