I don’t dance as much as I used to. Bare floors go unswept, red hairs unwashed. I don’t keep the company of good habits I rode through marshlands with. I snuck quietly and without drama away from the person I thought was cast in clay. In truth, I’ve lost touch with the person I used to be.

I send her postcards from time to time, from places she didn’t know how to get to. The map is little more than garbled tangles of wrong turns made so frequently I walked in circles, steep ascensions, bitter downfalls, a jagged line that eventually made its way up, up, up.

As much as I want to cast a bitter eye on the way I’ve let little rituals slip away, the little tenants that formed the scaffolding of who I’ve been, instead I find gratitude; there is enough space in my life for me to take a deep breath. A deep, crisp, full, unencumbered breath in the wiggle room around my life. It’s changing, and so am I. It’s somewhere right in the middle, undeniably not what it used to be and perhaps yet on the cusp of becoming something else. Right now, it’s not anything in particular. And I’m finding a friend in that free fall.

When I look for disapproval in the empty spaces of my life that used to be occupied by something valued, I breathe in that grace instead. Idle room for me to stretch my bones. Free plots ready for the harvest of something I can’t anticipate yet. Wide open spaces for me to find new valued things that better suit this life, the one I’m entering, the one that’s not quite yet but might be soon.

What a cramped point in time it would be should I try to keep everything I once had and acquire more still. And what a notion that I can’t put something down for a time and just… look around. Just explore the place that I’m in without the burden of a heavy load. What extremism would assume that I can’t ever pick it back up as I carry on my way. No, I won’t find scorn in letting everything fall at my feet now. I feel the swing in my arms, the opportunity of each moment, the encroaching and inviting new world I have found.

When I try to find fault with the breezeways of my days, instead I praise the air and sunshine that found their way through.