* For my dearest friend, Ms Karen, the most integral part of the Writers’ Collective –
When I look back on my life I know I have made mistakes, everyone has. Sometimes those mistakes pertained to my perception of my life or of myself. I often carried myself with a lament sounding in my head, struggling to refer to my life as being a glass half full, seeing that glass sitting on the kitchen table covered in fingerprints so thick they became interlayered, backpainted etchings, the hopes I held for the hours, the days, the weeks, the years of my life flying up, out and into the ether. Until the glass was half empty.
I tried to change my outlook a lot. Focusing on what I could do, instead of what I couldn’t. Staring up at the skies at night till the veins in my neck were straining, hoping for some kind of response from a celestial force. But there was nothing.
Or so I thought. There was a celestial force at work and it was slowly changing my view of my life, of myself. That force gathered as many positively charged ions and free electrons, bits of stardust, as it could so it could send me what I needed. The people, the writers, the creatives, the kindred spirits, the ones who became friends, to show me, encourage me, pointing like signposts, that the path I had found myself on was the right one. They were the golden years where we engaged so vigorously in our writing and creative pursuits we formed an unspoken writers’ collective. It was a family, we knew each other’s ins and outs, there was a comfort and ease to it as familiar as the way the sunset casts a golden glow on water , so enveloping we knew it would always be there. We hoped it would be.
Time can pass in the cruellest of ways, throwing boulders in your path that impede your progress, making you lose sight of the horizon. When the boulders are there they trap you in a mundane world – eat, sleep, work; eat, sleep, work – it’s all you know how to do when you’re trying to survive. And before you can remember how long it has been, ten years have passed, fifteen. All you can see in the midst of this passage of time are the shadows cast by the boulders, the golden years, the golden light, the golden times are so distant it’s like they happened to someone else.
One thing I have learned in my time on this planet is that you should never underestimate that celestial force. It is tenacious and persistent, always waiting for the path to clear. And it has to clear, right? It can’t be blocked forever. It’s like one of Newton’s Laws of Motion ‘ “For every blocked path that is intraversable, there is an equally traversable unblocked path.”
I got tired of the path being blocked. I was really over it, so I cleared it physically and emotionally. And not long after I noticed the golden hues of the sunsets. I could see the horizon and the people, the writers, the creatives, the kindred spirits, the friends, waving at me. They hadn’t left. The golden years hadn’t happened to someone else, they had happened to me. The people who get you, get you no matter how long it’s been. As if time hasn’t passed at all.
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