Four Years

I can’t believe it has already been four years. Four years since my hopes were shattered. Four years since I lost everything just as I thought I was about to finally craft my own happily ever after. Four years since that long silence, since the day that still grips my heart and burns my eyes.

Yet also four years since I submerged myself in my yoga practice. Four years since my practice saved me, since I saved me. Four years since I decided to be my own happily ever after, since I decided to stop waiting for someone else to bring happiness to me. When I finally decided it was always mine to take.

Time can be a scary thing. How is it that I can feel hardly anything has changed and so much has changed simultaneously? How can it feel so long ago yet also so recent? When I was younger each day seemed to be stacked up neatly in my mind. Each moment so powerful and poignant. It feels like many more significant things happened within the three years I was in middle school than have happened in the last four. Is that an accurate perception? Or is it distorted somehow as more years pile up behind me? Have the years smeared together naturally due to aging, or am I losing the clarity I once had due to drug use? Perhaps both?

How am I already turning 27-years-old next month? It makes me want to laugh and cry all at the same time. Who even am I now? Do I even accurately remember who I’ve been? How much more will my perception of time be altered as more years pass? I can’t bear for it to become any faster or murkier. Yet I fear it will. I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to keep changing. I had never envisioned myself even getting this far. And the rest of the road ahead seems less clear than ever.

Four years… a few blips in my memory. And what of the spaces in between them? Were they not worth remembering? Have I really wasted so much time already? Yet I remember that fall four years ago so well. It is sharp and sour. A drop in an ever-open wound. However, it is also sweet. It was that fall that taught me I would be there to catch myself. And that was enough. I was enough. I finally committed to myself, to my practice.

Nothing has changed since that day. Everything has changed because of that day. I am different. And I am the same. I have withered, and I have grown. Time marches on, relentless. A burden and a gift.