If there’s one thing I learned, it is this: you can run, but you cannot hide from yourself. She will always come back, knocking at your door, begging you to accept her. If you ignore her knock of request and refuse to let her in, somehow, she will find access into your home. She will not pose as an intruder, afraid of being caught. She will make you aware of her Presence.

At first glance, she appears lost, disturbed, distressed. And when you at look at her a little closer, you realize she, very composedly, is all of those things. Except lost. She is no longer lost. She has found her way back home, made her way inside. She is disturbed and distressed because she does not know if she wants to belong Here. But she does know, she came back. You witness her calling out all the wrong and imperfect she notices. Obsessively and compulsively trying to perfect her external reflection because she knows it portrays the substance of the real her down on the inside. And all she simply wants is to be better.

Better than no one but herself. Better than nothing but the cards she was dealt. Better in her circumstances. Feel better than nothing but the abandonment. Feel better in everything with all the acceptance. Speak to herself better than what she was told she would or wouldn’t be. See better than her eyes have seen in her surroundings. Bring her vision to life in this reality.

Disturbed and distressed in her mind, seeking better at home, in home.

I study her every move. I study her. Frequently repeating the same cycles she thought she was freed from. She’s searching. She’s thinking. She’s doing. She stops. Observes. Does not approve of what she created. Moves on. Or loves it, but it moves on from her. Not loving her. Leaving her. Bringing her to herself again.

She experiences long moments of hesitation in a sea of devastation, unsure if it is meant for her to swim back to shore .. to .. continue.. again.

Now she’s moving everything around, adjusting herself inside out; in her image. Fixing the thoughts in her mind. Forming a speech un-bitter, unhurt. She is trying to make everything make sense, every piece click. Because she can’t seem to find peace within with the thought of the fact that she’s not IT.

She’s not it. She is not perfect. She was not chosen. She spent every single cognizant moment of her life racing to this moment, just to discover it was not worth it. Because, although she believed she would be, although she believed she was and should be, she was not chosen.

She ran and hid, strategized a way to escape, even went in her mind’s eye and played. Spent 26 years a modern slave who ran away from home to be saved then returned home unchained to be embraced and ready to save the day the way she claimed she learned while away only to uncover she is still the same. No different from the home that is in the same place.

Cuffed to a love she never received. Searching for the peace that would make her complete. She thought it was a harmony she would find and they would make a beautiful collide, matching the rays from the sky, when she came back home.