Willow

I wish the people I love would stop leaving me.

Someone I hardly know told me, "It's easier to leave than to be left behind." True statement.

This past year has wrought too much change for me. People I love have left, moved out, moved away, moved on, moved up. The status quo I loved is gone.

This past year hasn't wrought enough change for me. Things I want still aren't here.

I can't keep rolling with the punches (if I've rolled at all). How many times can I alter my norm? Being flexible is not my strength, and the more I've thought about it I've realized flexibility is an extension of patience.

Everything I carefully crafted, cultivated and collected in my twenties is now diffusing. I can't blame them for leaving. They have to follow their own roads. I'm jealous of their new chapters.

"For the rest of your life you will see relationships split open and fall away, like when drought pulls the ground away from a fencepost, like when a wound opens. It's a hard thing to understand, this kind of loss where people don't really go anywhere."

My friends haven't gone anywhere. I will just have to make more of an effort to bridge the gap so I can enjoy the comfort of laughter, hugs, uncensored banter, lemon bars, salted chocolate and aid they offer me. I am not the Lone Fencepost.

Be made to bend. The line from a hymn I wrote down months ago. This too shall pass if I can just remain flexible.

Storms and wind break stoic oaks but bendy willows survive. I'm already built like a willow. I might as well act like one.

*Quote is an excerpt from an essay by Ashley Warlick