"It's In My Blood.."

So maybe we're not so different after all. Maybe the walls and layers and words are all just a facade. They are the mirrors of pain and anger at each other.. with ourselves. We seem to be closer than what we appear, closer than all the distance and silence and unforgiven tears have all lead us to believe.

" Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had..." - F. S. Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby"

I've been asked so many times where I've learned this obsession of travel, where my adventurous love affair originated. Who taught me to live on the wings of a free spirit? I simply replied, "I don't know. No one. It must be in my blood"...

Little did I realize the truth with which I speak.

She wanted to be a writer. She had dreams once upon a moon-lit night. Those were the days she had the world at her fingertips.. and she wrote words and sentences that spoke of truer days, that promised of a better life to come... a life that died with her worth and childhood ideals. She never had the ability to see through those dark nights, to hold her dream as tightly as she held her own head when she'd cry at night.

Turns out my blood runs truer with their own beating essence than my own alone, these women of my life. The breath they exhaled imprinted on my very existence, my "individuality" seems to be a little more of a ... commonality. My Grandmother's biggest regret was wondering "what could have been"... which also happens to be the biggest push for my life and the strength behind my hardest decisions. My love of music and books, my strength of character, my stubbornness ... all commonalities. I put school as the most important thing in my life; going to school was my savior, my pride and joy, the thing that would bring me the life I've always knew was mine. My grandmother never had the opportunity to feel the weight and the significance of a degree or diploma in her hands... and she always regretted it. She always wondered what would have been if she "would have only...". Now I realize the strength that carried my resolve to attain my degree came from whispers not so distant.

So I wasn't alone after all. We're not so different, us women. We hop and skip through each others lives, hurting each other on the outside and loving each other deeply in the shadows of our silences.

When I heard she wanted to be a writer, it was like all the walls came crashing down in an instant. She's not "her", she's me. I am her. We are part of each other, and we continue to carry each other through the dead silence of our stillness. There is no movement, no rushing towards each other in some strong resolve to embrace each other through our differences. But we hold each other still. We hold our memories, our differences, and our loves.. of each other.. of ourselves.

I don't know what happened when they lost it... those possibilities of their youth.. but in an instant the dreams were shut out, left in dark endings and broken promises. So I carry on for all of us. I carry the vehicle of beautiful dreams and youth and possibilities realized. I write for my Mom tonight. I travel for my Grandmother. I live for Me. She lives in Me. I live because of Her. We carry on within.