Growing up

The stories, the successes, the setbacks of the past resonate as she steps further away from her youth.  The sound is familiar, and yet somehow altogether different.

How is it that in "finding herself," she lost her grip on the things she thought defined her?  The friends, the occupations, the geographies that framed her life had been exchanged for new ones.  And so they slipped through her fingertips, from the forefront of her life to the depths of nostalgia and fading memories.  Soon everything was held with a tenuous grasp, ready to be surrendered.  Life was swirling, all was squalor.  The constants were no longer comforting, they were stifling.  She fled, she resisted the familiar, she forge a new framework.

It's Independence Day.  The soundtrack is the muffled sound of "Pops Goes the Fourth" echoing in an empty room down the hall, the show a distant display of fireworks framed by a bedroom window, tears streaking down her face in little torrents.  The loneliness sits in her gut like poison.  It's painful, yet numbing.  She is like a lifeless shell of herself.

From this desolate place, she begins to rummage through the discarded pieces of her life.  She realizes that in losing herself, she finds the most important Thing.