Shooting Stars

I am arriving here from an unintended hiatus. The buzz of the world and within my own life took me away from the sparse moments I had to reflect and share my words.

I meant to write this before the new year and then right after but the timing never quite worked out. That’s how time is, isn’t it? Fleeting, much like a shooting star blazing across the night sky. If you don’t take a moment to absorb what you’ve just seen then it will pass you by without a second thought.

In the time since I last put pen to paper or rather hands to keyboard, much has indeed changed. My country, my livelihood, myself. I turned 30 this year much to my own dismay but it was not quite as dismal as I thought it would be. I had planned for a trip to Mexico, inviting my closest friends, with the naiveness that perhaps things would be a little less dystopian and deadly. And much like how life tends to be, it was indeed the opposite. An obvious statement to anyone who has been following the news since the world shut down. With the virus at its worst and our government at its most chaotic, my 30th birthday was more or less a party of one celebrated south of the border. Traveling while a deadly pandemic surges throughout the country to another country was every bit as nerve-wrecking as it sounds. But it was in those moments when I settled into my surroundings that I felt I could finally be.

I spent the majority of 2020 growing accustomed to the sound of sirens and a sort of empty quietness from lack of communication with anyone other than my household. It was like being stone pressed against my own thoughts, while I watched as all the goals I had intended for myself slip away. It was not that I was not content in my own home, but more so that I felt unequivocally detached from everything else. In the year that wasn’t I thought Id meet someone to love, that I would finally be set forth on my purpose, that I would attain all the things I waited so long to seek. What I failed to see in my lowest points is that I did receive just that, albeit in a form I had not intended.

I met myself again, reconnecting with the girl who had lost her way and I grew to love her in the ways I had struggled to so often before. I found a reason to keep pushing on my path because my purpose is at the start of a long journey for which the reward will be well worth the wait. I attained all that I needed for myself on my own and without the prior hesitations of the timing not being exactly right. I found that hindsight is indeed 2020 because looking back all that I envisioned for myself came to be just as it was meant to. It’s the perception that needed clarity.

At the strike of midnight to this much anticipated new year, I found myself beneath a blanket of stars, with the sand beneath my feet. Where salted air filled the night as ocean waves played to their own melody. I could have never imagined how my year would end but it was every bit as perfect it needed to be.

I celebrated a new era in my life by giving thanks for the health and safety of my loved ones, knowing that it was the best gift that god could give me in a year that burdened so many others in a myriad of avoidable tragedies.

I felt for the first time that there is so much more good on its way even though I cannot see it, I feel it now, in every moment of the day, in my high’s and low’s. And then, one evening, when I allowed myself to just be, I saw a surge of light trailed by a blaze of fire shooting across the night sky. A shooting star, so close that it enveloped every part of me in the kind of way one only feels as a child, consumed by wonder. This ball of pure light, of promise, of hope, of opportunity…of time.

Every second that we have on this earth is not guaranteed. As the years come and go with each passing day, I can only hope that when night falls I could be like that of a shooting star. The symbol of hopes and dreams. This enchantment that proceeds on, unknowing of its end by the light of day. I wish to live long enough to experience all that the world has to offer and in doing so, never allow myself to flicker out quietly or in a delay. I do not see shooting stars as brief blimps in the shroud of darkness but rather symbols of how the rush of time is ever present and that you must never cease to captivate your surroundings. I see the stars that dance across the sky like travelers on a journey so determined to reach their destination they stop at being nothing less than extraordinary.

I wish that for myself as I venture onwards into the journey of my 30’s. That perhaps one day I look back on all that I have written here and with certainty know that I too was nothing less than extraordinary, a captivating symbol of what possibilities can do.