I wonder what it feels like…  To feel like someone cares…  Like there’s someone for me out there…

I long to take flight.  The lonely nights grasp at me clumsily, embracing me like an unwelcome lover stumbling gracelessly over my body.  Pulling the sloppy courtier’s flesh about me causes a chill.  How unwelcome it is.  Are not the hard days enough for me to endure?  Must I be violated in such a way that transcends the agony of survival?

In aloneness I suffer long.  Can you deny the same?

Battle scars eternally mark me.  They are evidence of heartaches past, the wounds left by dark foes sequestered to memory, perhaps even detritus of spirit wars long forgotten.  I touch them absentmindedly and trace their forms with my fingers.  They are badges and medals to me, proof that I endured the pain’s coming.  They count for lives and loves lost.  They represent broken hearts.  They exist as proof that I feel, have felt, and will feel again.

I look this way and that, and everywhere I turn I see lives giving way.  They crumble under the weight of living, unable to withstand.  Despite their best efforts to make right what is wrong, too many fall before their own hearts.  They lack the strength for what they need.

Am I next?

Just in time the fire illuminates, hot flames licking all about me.  They dance with me, for me, around me, and through me.  They touch me gently; they touch me roughly.  Heat unbearable burns away the black dross of doubt and uncertainty.  Drawn forth, it leaves pure mettle behind it.

I burn in the flames.  The me that pains my being is caught in lighted inferno, giving way so the desired self might rise high on gossamer wings.  My way is ablaze with the shining light of the fire’s intensity.  Though they may burn and though they may bring pain, these tongues of flaming fury work their hardest to bring me good.  Can its embrace be called experience?

Blinded by ferocious bright flames, deafened by their hearty roar, my soul’s journey from cause to effect is followed on faith alone.

I am me.  My only self is I.

Floating above piles of ashes from my former self, do they brush against me?  Or is it I against them?  I am unsure whence the motion comes.

My flight is solitary, and I know not how this is being surrounded by those I love.  Only for the living can such poignant bonds engender the loneliness of learning.

I hear them like the voices of golden ones singing.  They are those like me, those who love me, those with whom life gains meaning.  They are with me.  They are for me.  They never betray me their counsel or camaraderie.

If not drawn to the flame like a moth, how then shall I find them?  And they me?  The true me that is, the me filtered by fire to be real, a manifestation of what is within.

I face the flames ready.

I wonder what it feels like…  To feel like someone cares…  Like there’s someone for me out there…