Small Spaces

There are small spaces within you that are reflecting small spaces within me. You and I can be big and fiery, we both know that, but I didn't know that you also have the power to fall right at home deep within your own private world----an intricate place even more fascinating than the starry LED lights glowing on the walls and the raindrop tones filling the room from your steel tongue drum.

It's not the music that's making this moment stand out. It's the way your hair hangs forward like a curtain and your mind glows behind. I see you here with me, just the two of us, but I also see you in past lives and years, in the corner of a party or far away in the wilderness, comfortably small in your own tucked-away space where deeper thoughts bloom and the desire for more finds its ground.

You remind me of how comfortably small I used to feel, in the weird places where I didn't fit in, and I didn't really want to. Remember how it used to feel to already know you didn't belong? It was like the atmosphere changed, and everything and everybody felt far away. I don't know about you, but I was able to curl up inside and fall endlessly within. Sometimes it was scary, but mostly it was a relief to know I had an internal escape. It was like my own soul was coaxing me back to feel at home within, no matter how sad and depressing it felt at times to only want and need myself.

Those were the darker days, when my inward world was based on a need to disappear, rather than a desire to flourish. I didn't have a compass or drive, so my outside world remained toxicly static. And meanwhile, inside, it was like the small space had a trapdoor that opened up to internal infinity. It only opened when I needed it, which I often did, usually toward the end of the night when I found myself not able to truly relate or connect on a genuine level to anyone.

Isn't it wonderful that we can relate now? Isn't it wonderful to know that we were right all along and that there was something wrong with the company we kept, not just something messed up inside? That's why I love our flame. It grew as fuel and also as justice.

The tones pour out over one another like a waterfall as you continue to flow in beat and melody. There was hardly a moment of hesitation as you began to play this new instrument. When I tinkered around with it, I tapped the notes slowly, letting the various vibrations move through me one at a time, but you whisk them all together into a genius melody, layers of shapes, patterns, and sounds forming equations and architecture similar to the mysterious space around the moon. You've taken your inner world----that deep-feeling, complex place of intuition----and turned it inside out. It's become both our translator in times of misspoken words and our superpower in raising up only what matters. It is our atmosphere.

We already know what's most important in life, and it's not sharing and exploiting ourselves thin. It's keeping our connection sacred, both the private internal one as well as this shared terrain that feels timelessly similar. You play music the way I write----from a well that springs forth and receives in a self-nourishing loop, streams of iridescent water sprouting and sprinkling down much like a fountain replenishes the rippling pool below. We are seemingly still sitting here in your saturated tones, but all around us, inside and out, our souls dance around in the something-more of it all.

You love the truth. We both do. We cleaned ourselves out, dropping crutches like hats that didn't fit and coats we didn't need. No addiction or attachment. Just leftover pieces of times and places not quite right, in need of a blurry filter. When was it that you started drinking and getting into drugs? Was it right around the time when your soul started bleeding internally, begging for a realer escape, knowing you didn't fit in or something wasn't right? Isn't it funny how that was our intuition, but instead of listening, we feared ourselves and gave in, for a time, to societal and situational pressures? "Numb through it and fake it" was the way, but still, my internal space reigned me in and dared me to sense more. From that removed distance, I was able to see and face dark truths without getting burned, while at the same time, feel an incredibly desperate desire to connect. Not there. Not with those people, but eventually with someone or a vastly different society somewhere.

And here we are. Both of us clear and open, full-spectrum in every way. I like how I feel nervous and awkward sometimes. I like how I can wholly love myself, the way I wholly love you, as you uncover these small spaces and secret doors that hold parts of me that I may have tried to stomp out. In this dazzling dance of shadow and light, you sparkle somehow, skin gleaming with time travel dust, crystallizing this moment so that it never ends and obscuring where it began. A part of me wants to share you with the world, while the soft-petalled-centered part knows that this is what the universe is trying to teach me. The innocence and most precious parts of me and you.

Inside this space, as you let the music slow to a trickle and find its last drop, you lie down next to me present in the air of creation. Both our ears receptive, our souls reflecting, and our minds aglow in the nourishment of our intricacies, we are renewed. Out there, our dreams can warp and bloat in the entanglement of it all, but from in here, they grow naturally from a pure place. Our small spaces are good, as we always suspected, sowing the seeds of who we are, and underneath everything, who we have always strived to be.