lather, rinse, repeat

And the truth really will set you free. Would you look at that?

Swinging back and forth, higher and higher, I toss my head back as far as I can and for the very first time I feel relieved for my now shorter hair. My eyes look upwards and fixate on a single star that I spy resting between the silhouettes of two tree branches. I slowly begin to play connect-the-dots with neighboring constellations, and above and beyond the whooshing wind in my ears, I listen closely to the words that are being spoken to me.

These words are words of truth that I want and need to hear. And although I want to hear them, every few minutes I find myself choking back tears with moderate effort - oh! these tears are desperately searching for release, but I'm not about to give. No, not this time.

It's a little like growing up and choosing not to cry when you scrape your knee or when someone pulls a band-aid from a freshly healed wound: it tears at you a bit and damnit if it isn't quite painful, but when you grow-up, you just stop crying over scraped knees (or spilled milk).

And yes this hurts.
Perhaps a little more than a scraped knee.
But right now I'm taking the John Mellencamp approach to all of this in hopes that, in the end, it will just hurt so good.

The truth is, friends, that rational people make mistakes and even sometimes behave irrationally.
The truth is that strength has tiny little cracks in it called weakness.
The truth is that big girls do cry, and that the people who have everything going for them sometimes fall; they sometimes look down and see their life broken into a million tiny pieces and resting in the palms of their hands.

But the other truth is that those pieces (at least most of them) can be glued back together - as long as you take a deep breath and work really hard at it. Like a puzzle, you have to want to finish it.

Finish what I've started... yeah.
For the first time in a really long time, I want to.
I really, really want to.

As I swing my legs forward and then backward, pushing myself higher into the air, I get kind of scared. It's been awhile since I've been on a swing. It's pitch dark out and the higher I go, the more concerned I become about how I'm going to stop. I could just jump off, but I'd probably end up hurting myself more than I'd intended to.

And then... well, the higher I go, the more that it doesn't seem all that bad. If it's all up from here on out then I think I can handle that.

I'm not going to lie; this life can really really suck.
But really: fuck it.
It's so damn beautiful that at times, I can hardly stand it.