"An Education"
You don't need scores of people looking at you admiringly to feel beautiful.
You don't need Chanel no. 5 lingering on your skin and heels that click only on the ballroom floor next to the empty bottles of champagne to know the good life.
Here, right here, in this moment, feeling the gentle thrum of life vibrating within you--that is it. Loving things. reading books. letting music penetrate your soul, kissing, taking a moment from your jar of time to watch the sunrise or the sunset and if you're extremely lucky, both of them in one day. Life is simple. Life is to love.
Yes, I have felt loneliness. I know its touch like the familiarity of a comb through my hair in the morning. I know it by name, just it is knows me by my own and it is nothing more than neglecting the things that are beautiful and wondrous and meaningful; forgetting the people you love. It is nothing more than ingratitude for the wondrous life you have been given. I won't pretend I have never been this way for I have. I have forgotten. I have neglected. I have wondered, "Why me?" and even, "Why not me? Where is my fair share of love and life in this world? Why am I alone?" But truth is, I am not alone. I am lonely by my own doing. I haven't known true loss until I have found something that is worth loving more than anything and the key to finding that is knowing that you already have that. I know that I do. Oh, I know that beyond anything in this confusing and beguiling world.
Think of your favorite coffee mug. Your key chain. Your pillow. Think of the things that bring you comfort and the little things with which you bear your soul into. For me, it's paperbacks and postcards. It's useless coasters, pens, my watch, my beautiful headphones, the "clack-clack" in the heels I wear or the orange juice I consume more than air and, gosh, the stars that I dare call my own--they all are more meaningful than I could ever explain. Then there are things that are invaluable and precious beyond comprehension--my mother, my father, my four sisters and two brothers. My God, my twin sister, my friends (though they may be few) and this world. This riveting, riveting world.
It isn't until I've experience what little powerful and painful things I have in this life that I have realized with deep gratitude that there is something that gives us a gift, or rather someone. He looks at you when the time is right and with his hands held out to you places something heavy and dark into your hands. For a long time you don't understand what it is and so it sits on the shelf within you, weighing and perplexing and it watches you until one day the clock sings the perfect song and suddenly this gift that is within you, always beside you--it is nothing like you ever remember meeting, but somehow you've known it all your life. Yet, it isn't until this moment, here and now, that you realize you've never understood it, only now you do. Now you do. The small darkness, the heavy perplexity is pain and it isn't until now that I realize, this too, is a gift.
Not the best you'll ever get and undoubtedly not the prettiest, but undeniably the most important of all.
This I know.
-k. pauline benson
november 7, 2016
9:31pm
monday
"An Education" (part i)
