Oct 20, 2017
I wrote this in my journal one day, asking a dear friend who had passed, to give me some sort of sign.
"Help me feel excited again. Dance in dreams. Fall so into the moment with you that we laugh so hard we cry. Help me come back to who I really am."
Anything to get me excited again. I had lost that uncontrollable giggle, my adventurousness seemed to shrivel over the years. I remembered the crazy times we had. Even the drama was delicious. I needed to feel my free spirit charging through me again. So I sat in the park at the foot of a mountain I used to climb. I'd just found a penny in the grass, but it wasn't even enough to nudge my mood upward. The wind plowed the air and my loneliness pinned me to the ground. I started writing. I wrote to him with the ache of missing the girl I used to be.
That night, I sat on my couch in a haze, soul-drained, sad beyond reconciling.
And then the closet started ringing.
I rushed over and swung open the door. Under a pile of extension cords, I rooted out my old phone that hadn't been turned on for over five years. The alarm was going off.
I freaked. I pressed off the alarm and dropped the phone on the kitchen counter, running to the couch to pull my thighs up to my chest. I cocooned myself in a wooly blanket, all the way up to my neck so I couldn't feel my full body goosebumps against the AC. My breath pumped ferociously and a rush of energy concentrated in my throat.
I jumped.
The alarm rang out from the kitchen. It was going off again. WTF.
This time I turned off the phone. And I let my friend know that while I loved knowing he got my message, that a sign a little less poltergeist-y would suffice next time.
But he was there.
He heard me.
He saw the girl that everyone used to talk about. The one that danced all night and made no apologies. The one who dreamed wild and laughed hard.
Knowing she was seen opened her spirit to come out again and play.