The state of my soul

Sometimes, when the world throws you a lifeline, you have to grab it with both hands and hold on for dear life.

Have you ever felt an unavoidable an uncontrollable pull towards something, regardless of what your mind or your heart or your body seems to say? An ache for something abstract, the urge to be in a specific place, in order to feed your soul.

I have no right to be drowning.

I am over-privileged, over-educated, over-achieving, oversleeping, overdrawn and over everything. I have no right to feel like I am floundering in this concrete city of ambition and aspiration and opportunity and yet I am. I am suffocating under the heavy, cloying tarmac, free falling from the jagged tip of the phallic Shard, screaming into the stale, unwashed air of a Tuesday afternoon.

Within the hungry belly of this city, where people are employed to wash phone boxes and polish street signs, I have lost my hunger for life. The reflection of my pale face follows me from shiny surface to surface, making doleful eyes at me, scrabbling to break into the realm of the living and to dance in the leaves again.

People cannot understand why this world of everything is not enough for me. Surely this life is everything I should want?

It is everything I wanted, once. This city of rooftops and rivers and red wine and sticky, sun soaked pavements and candlelit taverns suddenly feels vacuous, empty, filled with false smiles and meaningless ideas and the relentless, repetitive bitter winter sting of the everyday struggle.

My own restless ghost goads me from across the street, shining brightly in a flurry of heady perfume and clattering shoes. I don’t understand how the blistering bonfire that used to rage from the tips of my toenails to the ends of my hair went out, but now I am coughing up choking black clouds of toxic smoke.

I feel weightless, translucent, floating from place to place as though one eager gust of wind could blow me off the side of the world for good.

Even the plastic sunflowers wrapped around my bicycle shriveled and died and I just can’t help but think that there has to be something more than this.

But

you have to keep you ear close to the pulse of the earth, because from deep within the knotted turmoil and the carnivorous chaos, the cosmos offered me a glimmer of the stars.

A single book left on a shelf in the middle of the Irish countryside, in the midst of mourning and hopelessness, offered me a lifeline, and a very tiny taste of the sweetness the world used to hold for me.

Which is why I am leaving everything and thinking not about what is best for my mind or my heart or my body but what is best for my soul.

You have to be alert to the signs, and when the universe offers you a lifeline, no matter how weathered and fraying it may look, how gossamer-thin and delicate it may feel, you have to put your trust in it and jump.