"And I'd do anything to get back there again..."
I've had that line playing in my head today. It sounds like a country song to me. I don't know who sings it, or if anyone does actually, but I'm sure someone has, and it strikes a chord with me.
Have you ever had one of those moments when you've looked at yourself in the mirror, or seen a photograph of yourself and not recognised the person the person you're looking at?
I must have been too busy living lately to realise that I've grown up.
I look in the mirror every morning and my bleary, still half asleep eyes continue to see the same girl that they did five or six years ago. She is young and bright and bouncy and has the world at her feet. She is naive and optimistic and so pure that she is almost virginal.
But yesterday some newly formed baggage under my eyes made me look twice and then thrice at the girl staring back at me and I could see that her eyes were a deeper brown than I remember.
I looked deeper, searching for a shred of familarity but almost every feature failed me.
This time, the girl staring back at me was a woman. She had felt loss deeper than either of us knew she had the strength to get through. She had felt her heart shatter several times, and each time picked up the pieces a little bit more weary and a little bit more cautious. She had laughed at grown up jokes, developed political views and had bills to pay and her own furniture.
I panicked. I didn't recognise this stranger, nor did I know what she was doing in my mirror. Where had the young, bubbly girl gone who I had become endeared to after all this time? Where were the innocent smiling eyes that had stared back at me not so long ago? Who was this person with her concerns and her bills.
Then the girl smiled and I suddenly knew who she was.
She had seen joys beyond the imagination of her former self. She had experienced death, but she had marveled at new life. She had loved so intensely that it had consumed her thoughts. She had drank fine wines and travelled to new places. She had started a new life and stood on her own two feet. She had stumbled and she had the scars to prove it, but she wore them like an accessory, with pride and with a smile.
She wasn't the same girl who I was so used to seeing. She was someone different. Someone more. She had been places and seen people and she had lived a life unimaginable in her younger years.
I dont know where I'm going but I know where I've been...
And that's all i need to know, because it's made me who I am.
