New Beginning

I felt reality splitting away from me, a galaxy's travel away. The knowing part of me has dissipated and I am left stripped again and lost. A familiar feeling but one I thought I had left behind. The stars tell of a new beginning and I wonder if I've just been offered the most direct, though messy route. I think of Kali, of forced change for the better and I hope that it is she that is guiding my steps. I'm overcome with an urge to wander and walk, walk, walk. Perhaps not away but at least to create space from this. How is it that pain always makes its way back, creeps in with the night and quick releases its venom in the shadows, so seamlessly that you'd never know what happened? And yet it's such a slow death. I fight it at first but over time after so many blows the familiar feeling is almost welcomed in. "Hello old friend. How nice to see you. Please, take my soul, all my joy, and everything I've built if it will please you." I wince and snap back as if out of a dream and wonder how I was possibly so confident just yesterday, some 10 hours ago. Blow-by-blow I am worn down to nubs, the shelter I created blown into a thousand shards, splinters to cut my flesh; to feel something once again. It puts things into perspective, pain, rendering everything else minute and meaningless. Fully exposed, perhaps it is so I have nothing to hide, nothing to lose with only the option to move on, push into the unknown. Could that be even more terrifying than the onslaught of pain? The reality of impermanence. The stars must be right in their prediction--there will be change because I will not be the same I am sure, as pain changes all. This time though I will not die an easy death, numb and floating, spinning into nothingness. Or maybe, it is a matter of death of this existence, or the brutal massacre rather of the old rendition of myself that so that I can shed this skin for the next journey...but of my own choosing. It's a matter of survival it seems, so I am not suffocated by my cocoon of previous experiences, trapping me in preconceptions, strangling me with details of what I think I know. She must die, this self masochist with her torture chamber who allowed us to be beaten and strangled until there was no more understanding of what the self was. I will be liberated, heavy with scars but as clear of myself as I am of the pain, relentless in pursuing strength, growth, wisdom, and truth.