In which I am content.

For the past few weeks, I've felt myself disappearing.

It was terrifying, because it was reminiscent of these days, or these ones...

dark times.

(heck, I'm not afraid to say it: pre-Zoloft times).

I couldn't remember what I loved, or even what I liked.
I didn't want to do anything.
But not doing anything was even worse, because it turns out...when you can't remember who you are, being alone is unbearable...

because you don't even have yourself to keep you company.
And so you stay busy, you stay around people, and you sleep a lot.

But then, over the last few days, I found myself waking up a little bit, like a perennial popping back through the soil in the spring. It wasn't ever dead, the bulb was there all winter long, waiting for the sun to come back.

And I don't know for sure what it was...
but it might have been being in a classroom, teaching music for the first time in far too long
and then spending almost an hour just chatting with the teacher I work with.

It could have been spending an hour talking with a new friend about moray eels, free diving, and the new edition of the scriptures.

It might have been the Duke Ellington/Super Mario Brothers mashup that a kid in my jazz class improvised the other day,

or the look on the face of a woman I had barely met as she sang to me, (just for me) to "outshine the sun" and looked at me with as much love as one stranger can look at another.

Whether it was all of these things or none, it feels like someone who loves me has whispered, "You didn't disappear. You were here all along, you just forgot. See, let me remind you who are."

And now I'm smiling at strangers again,

and singing because I want to

and talking to people because I love them, and not because I'm afraid

because I'm not afraid

and maybe tomorrow all of this will go away and I'll feel like a shadow again but for now, I feel light (it's amazing how heavy nothingness can get) and I feel complete.

And best of all:

I'm still here.