You can’t go forward, and you can’t go back. That’s the strange weight of it. You end up stuck somewhere in between—suspended in a time that doesn’t make sense. Out of sorts. Searching for a way out, but not out. Searching for a way in, but not in. Wanting to be anywhere other than here—and yet not quite anywhere else either.
It’s an odd kind of exile. You want to exist but not be seen. You want to be lost but also found, grounded in a place that feels like yours even if it doesn’t look like the one you imagined. When you awaken inside this middle ground, you fumble for footing. The step you lost somewhere back there, before the first step, calls out like a ghost. And yet, here you are.
The pains of change begin to show. The sting of leaving behind what you’ve always known in order to learn what you haven’t yet mastered. You stumble. You make mistakes. Not the catastrophic kind, but the expected ones—the kind that mark anyone brave enough to try and reach for “something else.”
It feels like standing at the edge of dawn, waiting for the sun to rise but not knowing what it will illuminate. The illusion of “the other side” fades as you arrive. What you thought it would be doesn’t match what it is. Not worse. Not better. Just different. A truth that hits you square in the chest: This isn’t what I pictured—but it’s where I’m meant to be.
You question your sanity, of course. Why so many cross this bridge into the unknown, through the wormhole, down the rabbit hole. Why you followed, feet first, hands grabbing at shadows, desperate to pass through the wall or the mirror or both. You wonder if you learned the secret too fast—or not nearly soon enough.
But here you stand. Watching. Breathing it all in. And suddenly, there’s no emotion left to drain you. No fear. Just doing. No expectation for a future. No clinging to a past. Only this. The right now.
The mind goes quiet. That uncomfortable silence where the ghosts stop haunting you. The conversations you replayed on a loop? Gone. The judgments you hurled at yourself for what you should have done, could have done, but didn’t? Wiped away. There’s no more drama, no more chaos, no ticking of the clock. Just this moment—raw, present, unshaped.
And strangely, you can’t remember what it was like to live any other way. You only feel the absence of the ache you used to carry. The ache of holding on for what you didn’t have, wishing for what might return, or clutching the possibility of “maybe.”
Then it hits you. You remember the bathroom floor, your tears soaking into tile, begging to be here—to reach this place where you no longer suffocate. And now, here you are. Standing in the shoes you once dreamed of.
So the only question left is this: now that you’ve arrived, now that the ghosts are gone and the weight has lifted—what else will you dream up?
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