de l'encre au bout des doigts

Sometime, you think you've reached the end. The end of the road, the end of your will. You don't understand how you go on but you do, because there is no other way, because you won't know of different paths than your own. Because the unthinkable does not exist in your world and values, and so there it is, there is no solution but to walk forward in the darkness.

After all, it is your own road on which you walk through life, or rather, you belong to it, you've lost yourself in its hills, somewhere along the way, bend after bend, obstacle after another, you've shed bits of yourself and can't remember being something else than what you are today. There's been happy moments, shiny memories filled with carefree joy and light, and maybe that's where your energy comes from nowadays.

Most days you feel grey and unseen and unimportant. You're the tallest girl I know, and also the thinnest, yet you feel petite and obese. You're trapped in your life, you're trapped in your body, in your unfulfilling job, in the unseen pain of the everyday details and futilities. 

Every detail is so important and failed. 

You feel invisible, like, no one sees you, no one really needs you even though you're indispensable and so demanded upon that you never seem to have time for yourself. You manage a team of eight in a marketing firm and you can't remember having time on your own, just you and the silence and the wind in the leafs. You'd walk down the river and lie on the grass under an old tree, and you'd watch the sky and the sun through the branches, and you'd listen and be heard. 

How horrifying… To be alone with yourself once more and face the truth of what you think you've become. You've put the bar so high for yourself that you're bound to fail.

Sometime though, you forget that you hate your life and yourself and the choices you've made. You had reasons for them, they were probably sound ones but now that you look back everything seems wrong. Yes, somedays you let go of what you think you should be, your soul takes a break and puts its personal cross aside. For a while your body relaxes, your face becomes appeased and the shadow of a smile that I've sadly become used to gives light to a true laugh. You tilt your head gracefully, (unbeknownst to yourself you are a truly graceful and beautiful person…), your eyes look upon the world with happiness for a short while. It is not easy for you, to be happy, to be carefree.

I see you. From afar I close my eyes and I see your chestnut hair, your grey eyes that always reminded me of a painting of the ocean. There are storms and stories behind your eyes, unspoken tales that even I don't know.

You could never be invisible to me, I could never not need you in my life. And I could never ask anything of you other than what you would want to give me. It's like that. We met in the crib, our mothers had the same nanny, we went to the same schools, the same library and bell-ringing club, we fought over opinions and candy and sometimes dated the same boys. We helped each other with acne cream, college choices, husband decisions and anti-wrinkle cream shopping. You're my kin. I saw you grow up and make choices, I gave you my opinion and sometimes we fought and I gave up, but even I can't quite say when the corners of your mouth took a sad turn.

Strangely enough, I've seen a new spring in your step lately. Something that looks a lot like hope and will. The determination to be who you are and nothing else, as if you were in your car and turned left instead of going on the same old boring road. Your path seems rockier and harder, and yet new and exciting and scary and perhaps fulfilling. 

I think it's called being yourself again. 

You could never be careless but you seem carefree, or at least carefully free… I can't put my finger on it, and it doesn't matter. I think I can trust you to make your own path, I'll worry for sure, I'll wake you up in the middle of the night and ask you silly questions, and, well, maybe next Saturday we could go to the pub and get drunk like old times, and you'll tell me the story behind this new smile haunting your lips.