'But what's holding you back? What's...' he hesitated, 'what's stopping you from moving on?'
I'd been asked this question countless times over the last year. A lot of those times, after those initial months, it was me asking myself the same thing, but in different forms. Often, I sighed the question away. More often than not, I found that there was not one person who could ever really get it. Not the way that the missing element in the question would have been able to get it, and that was the whole point really. But this time, coming after one of those "life" conversations that I found myself having lately, I found myself able to enunciate an answer.
'What do you mean holding back?' I turned the question back to him, just to see how he was playing it.
'Holding back like, why are you stuck?' He also seemed to be struggling with how to phrase what he was questioning. Maybe he didn't know what it was that he was questioning, either.
'But, I'm not stuck, not really,' as I turned my answer over in my head, it seemed to fall in place right as the words came about, almost without effort.
Because he was genuinely curious and concerned, I tried to explain the deep sense of calm that was embedded inside of me, the calm that many people could not understand when faced with the circumstances. A calm that others didn't know existed but avoided from becoming acquainted with altogether, simply because they avoided me and the calamity they believed came packaged with me.
'Look at how much I have achieved in the short span of one year. For a lot of people, it's overwhelming. Although some think that I've been stuck or holding back, I've been doing so much. And for others, it's another side of the coin, as if maybe something has been in the way of me being able to achieve. But really, it's never been ... what is now absent in my life ... that's been in the way or holding me back somehow. The thing is, all this time, I have been accomplishing all of this for that absent part of me.'
'To stop being absent?'
I smiled.
