To Make Time Stand Still

I just need it to stop, just for a moment.
Time.
But it doesn't.
It won't.
It can't.
The impossibility of time bending to my will.
I want it to be over.
I want it to last forever.
I want it to be tomorrow where hope lives and freedom rules.
Where justice is served and my heart is as free as my spirit.
What do you do when time needs to move quickly...
Yet you want it to stop tick, tick, ticking.

This is the beginning of my admitting, my confessing to myself that my marriage is over.
In fact it's been over for a long time.
"You've had your foot out the door for the last three years!"
Have I?
If it's true then the truth doesn't hurt.
It's a painless blow.
It's an inanimate object with no life or feeling.
It just lays their between us.
The gulf grows.
I find comfort in the distance.
I can breathe again.
I can feel again.
My bed is safety.
There is peace within my walls.
My mind becomes my fortress.
The strength I daily find is incumbent with resilience.

There is no more sifting through questions seeking for answers.
There is the simple and plain truth spread before me like a picnic blanket in the sun.
The food is prepared and displayed.
Each dish present holds sorrow and betrayal.
There is shame.
There is loathing.
There is joy and love nestled in with the condiments.
They are the children that this banquet produced.
They are the salvation of the hope that never dies.
They are my saving grace, the desert whose sweetness never ends.
In the midst of the vile and the persecuted...
The gift of innocence and the proclamation that it wasn't all for naught.

I am learning to be my own authority.  How I navigate the unknown waters of my new found and deeply appreciated independence.  I have removed the filter and within the  uncharted waters of freedom, I trail my fingers through, contemplating the coolness and fluidity of the liquid.

I determine that I will be present in the moments, all the moments where time keeps ticking.  I will be present to feel the joy that I believe in, the beauty found in small things that take my breath away.  I will look into the face of love and dare to believe that it is true, it is just and it is given.  I will find beauty in the small things because the small things aren't small at all.  They conjoin in a mass of joy to burst into being the big things that matter.  The creation of things that always matter.

I matter.

There is freedom in the sound of surrender.  Surrender to time that will neither stand still or speed ahead.  There is freedom to feel what I feel and accept the truth and the facts for what they are.

This is my life.  I am present.  I am here.  I exist within this never ending vortex of time.