Something is changing.
I have been an immigrant nearly all my adult life. First in the UK, then USA and currently in France.
Movement and change were my wings. Lately, or perhaps for a long time now, I’ve felt clipped.
An emptiness pervades my insides, as if the being of my Being had lost its flight, collapsed into a heap of cold unfeeling despair. Deep at the bottom of the ocean.
The surface waves don’t create ripples: I smile, function, exist, and at times, survive.
Deep down there is an inchoate swirling amidst the stasis. Something is churning.
I have become more than my current life allows for. So this is the thorn in my unmoving foot. I need more and I resist.
Why?
I am not certain there’s a singular answer but after years of flux, perhaps I craved stability. Here, in Paris, I refused to let go although I was miserable. I was, am, still searching for an elusive sense of home.
Hold on, don’t leap again, it’s not too bad, you’ll make it. Six years of denying oneself creates a shadow, a phantom self.
Suspension is nowhere to thrive. Limbo, Dante says, is one step away from purgatory. Yet, there is a comfort and placid inertia in self pity. We get lulled by inaction and our own sorrow becomes a bedfellow, night after restless night.
Some remain corralled, encrusted like a wreck at the bottom of this ocean. The tides come and go, seasons, years, nothing moves a soul in denial of its truth.
Others, like me, flounder, take in the sea waters, pour out salty tears, feel the prick of discontentment and struggle to define the shape of their happiness. For many moons.
Until one day, they sit down and say:
No more. The music is calling, again.
An orchestra of change is awakening, listen.
Fly, jump, move, love, again —
Live again!
An old magic is afoot. It’s my magic.
Something is changing.
