Inside I'm Alive

When I was growing up, I was never a Sesame Street girl, I was a Barney girl. I even had the ill-fated hamster named Zippy like the one on the show, who unfortunately made a bid for freedom in his plastic little ball and got stuck in a divot on the lawn in the Arizona sun, and, I suppose, eventually was free though not in the greatest of ways.

It wasn't until I was much older that I saw Sesame Street, or one of those shows for children. All I remember of it was seeing a girl running down a series of hallways, all white, each one the same except for the plain white doors to either side. She eventually chose one and was dropped into the world of the letter N or some other inane place.

The image has always stuck with me, an image that represents what is inside my head. I picture my brain as that white plain hallway with twists and turns and branches, doors hiding the thoughts, feelings, and memories I've accumulated inside.

Some door aren't meant to be open.

Even the therapists I pay way too much to talk to have agreed that some door should remain shut and locked, though I don't know which ones they are, I can only hope they are locked from within. Others are meant to be opened, not by the light of day, but rather in that magical time of night where the hours have stopped climbing their way to midnight and have begun again.

A day is born in those quiet hours as I lay in bed wishing and aching for sleep as the man that I love breaths heavily and slowly in my ear, caught up in the world of dreams that somehow skips over me. In those moments, I sometimes find a door, a door that looks for all the world like the rest of them but inside are the moments where I have felt my most alive.

The first time a boy touched my hand and not by accident, but on purpose as I waited for my dad after school. This door doesn't allow for the heartbreak that came later, when my decision to remain a virgin didn't work with his vision of our relationship. No, this door only holds those moments of hope. The promise of a gift not yet opened to bear disappointment, that magical moment of meeting the eyes of a stranger that I'll never truly know, the anxious moments of waiting to meet a man I only know online or the love we would later share.

During that stolen spot in time, the minutes ticking onward with the steady beat of my heart, I stand within that hallway, right inside that door. I'm screaming that I'm alive, and that being so is a wonderful beautiful thing.