Somewhere only we know.
Manfred Max-Neef was right. We all want that thing, and those things, and that ring, and that time, and that place.
You are here now. It took some time for you to arrive, but I just wanted to tell you that it does get easier. And I still insist that you must trust the process.
And I think you are doing the right things. Exercise. Eating healthy. Talking to your friends.
Hug yourself and hug your people, after they have had a PCR Test and a vaccine of course.
Talk to them, reveal yourself and your emotional state, your vulnerability. And you lean on each other and you travel together down this road. Learn as you go about the day.
Stop to pick up the flowers. Smell them, Google for their names. Find out about that Agapanthus that’s in all of the gardens. Spend some time wondering if it has any medicinal properties. And ask why its purple sometimes, red sometimes and why in other gardens it blooms into full white?
Play some music from the 90s or the 80s, and that soul from the 60s and 70s and even that Michael Jackson Thriller album fam. Make a playlist, remember your youth, and those times before everything else. That time when you were alone without everyone else, sitting up in your bedroom at your mom’s house.
That time when you had your freedom to become who you wanted to become.
Take a walk before the sun sets, or just before sunrise. Take it all in. Take your life on. Play some Jill Scott. Count your blessings, with each breath, as you move on and with each step that you take, forward.
Play some Sting on the earphones, think about what he was thinking when he wrote "I am an alien in New York", or what he was trying to tell us in "Fields of Gold", and just feel each moment of each verse in "Fragile". And hear out Phil Collins when the drums drop on “In The Air Tonight". He was going through a lot its said.
Each day gets better, stay in your faith in God, get spiritually stronger. Have no fear. Learn to let God into your thoughts and into everything that you do. Its liberation. Let Him do all the talking and what He needs to do.
There used to be this other show on SABC3 in the late nineties called "Life, Love and Everything Else" it was from the UK, but there they called it “Cold Feet". I loved it so much. I would sleep late into the night watching repeats. I loved that shit fam.
My problem is that I have always been a hopeless romantic. But looking back, that show taught me a lot about romantic relationships in adulthood and adulting.
When I had good internet, I downloaded torrents of every single episode. I have the entire series now, and I sometimes go back to it to get some education, to checkout and laugh, but also to understand that the human condition described in that damn Max-Neef framework is actually a reality. Its not made up. I believe it now.
We all want affection, to belong and to chase that happiness bubble and we pray and hope that the happiness stays and it keeps raining. We want that perfect cusp of happiness.
So, my friend, heal your heart. And when your heart is healed and it is full of love I think, it will then know and recognise its companion. Love is like that, it is that.
And so it remains that, God is love. 💙