No.Shite.
Do we all miss someone, somewhere? A time, a place, a smell, a moment.
It’s not fair. None of this is. It’s not meant to be. Fair is something we created our of whole cloth to make us feel better about the way things are. The inherent crap that is our day to day lives.
How else to explain the suffering of a small child? Or the loss of a loved one far too soon? Or war, or terror or sadness?
I miss me.
Simply put. I could miss my mother, my childhood, the person my father was. I could miss the cool light of a December evening, or the dusky humidity in the August air. I could miss laughing by a cool stream as petals rained down from the trees one bright late spring. I could miss the rising sun on my eyes like fuzzy peaches, feasting on the morning.
I miss the girl who saw those things. I miss the girl who breathed in moments, snatched, grasped, held softly. I miss the girl who didn’t know any better, who would walk off the plank from bad eyesight and excitement. I miss that girl.
Her beauty was in the sheer madness in her eyes, the unstoppable way she barrelled through life. Her laughter, her words. She felt, she heard she was.
It’s not fair. I don’t know where I lost her, or where she died. Is she merely hidden? Can I unearth her, covered in dew worms and slowly rotting tin cans? Is she only covered in the waste of years of sadness and anger, or is she buried under it? Can she be retrieved?
I miss her. I miss her when I see something quietly pretty, or when my children feel the wonder only youth can hold, that sloppy newness. I miss her when I feel my age, in numbers written, in all the things I don’t know. All the things I don’t know! They surround me, and I can barely see myself behind them.
So much time. So much space. So much yearning.
That girl wanted to be free so badly she lost her bearings on what freedom really was. She lost her ability to shape her life in the ways she wanted. To not be created by the events of her life, but rather molded by them, warned. That girl feels so long ago.
It’s not fair. It never was. It wasn’t fair when that girl ran and ran and ran as fast as she could, landing wherever she found herself. It wasn’t fair when she found herself lost, dangling through life, daring herself to make it better.
It’s not fair. But I do miss her.
Spin Me I Pulsate 
This is probably going to sound odd, but bear with me. In a book I read once about knowing God, it pointed out this tendency people have, that when they feel some spark or glimpse or longing or conviction or anything like that, they think, “Oh, I should pray” or “Oh, I want to have an encounter with God” or things like that. The book said that those moments ARE the encounter with God. In the same way, I think these moments you have where you miss your other self ARE evidences that she is still in you. They are HER moments, her voice, etc. I hope that gives you some hope — she is there, covered but not buried, burdened but not sunk.
I wish I had a chance to meet that girl. I’m SURE I would have liked her. My kind of people.
I miss ignorance. I suppose I don’t want it back, but I do miss it.
Thanks for your sweet comments on my blog about my new grandbaby. 🙂
Don’t worry, that girl is still there, still “you”. You can’t lose that part of yourself, although you might have to search for “you” in there.
Take care,
Diane
😦 (((hug)))
good stuff, sucks how the most hardest feeling stuff usually is…
i missed a lot here during the last week i spent with my friend from exactly those teenage years, those raw, pure, yearning years. it was wonderful having him back here for much too short a while, breathe a little of that incredibly crisp air, feel the early morning drizzle … feel seventeen again – not for the feeling young but for the feeling un-numbed, uncommitted, unburdened.
just got him and his partner to the airport and came back home, i guess they’re taking off this minute. i miss him already.
i haven’t experienced the hard times you lived through during your teens, i am not bipolar, i have no idea what you’re going through right now, i guess. but i do absolutely hear you about missing that person that most of us must have left behind at some point when life just became an everyday thing. i still miss the crispness, the new-ness, the sheer force of reality as it would hit me at some times. i can still grasp it sometimes, but can never hold on to it for long until that slightly dusty blanket covers it all up again. i wish i could grab your hand and yank you back to that sidewalk back in time, to that damp street under the streetlights where you wanted to run off into your future.
I loved reading that post. I have a “me” inside that I am missing as well.. I think we all do in a way.