My life is so far from where I want it to be. Indeed, I am so far off course that I feel utterly and fully lost. Despite goals and resolutions, do-overs and re-starts, I cannot seem to find the path—I will not say “the path back” because I fully doubt that I was ever on it to begin with. I realize that I must be careful here. For what we offer ‘honestly’ is not necessarily ‘truth’.

     I feel like stone. Wind and lichen, frost and sun, ice and moon light. My world is blue. My use is not forgotten, for it has never been discovered.
     I feel like stone. I was raised with purpose. Can it be that I have missed it in watching the path of the sun? Winter is here, yet still I cannot find the way.
     I feel like stone. Could my use have been so brief that I lived the moment without realizing it? I understand so much better now how one can tire of life, tire of trying not to wait and yet being forced to because there was no where to go.
     I feel like stone, but then I take a breath and my fingers hum. I am enveloped in the sound. An envelope…no! A gate. I move carefully about the room. I must not lose my balance. I must not wonder if I have found the way or I will stumble back to stone.
      “Here stone. Now, right now. I have brought you a gift.” My lady of sorrows, my bronagh bean-uasal, she has opened a door to the place between. The rift hums and vibrates. Through my buzzing fingers. Through the breath. The truth comes out.
     She does not heal me. She does not offer comfort, a soft word or an answer. She simply allows me to hear my pain, completely, utterly, accurately, honestly, truthfully in a way that these…these broken stones, these words never will! No confusion, no hesitation…or a time I am lost in its purity.

     The vibration ceases, the portal closes, the vacuum hammers my ears and I crumble bursting into a thousand pebbles. 53 and my heart weeps like a child. I am in the Library. The gate is closed. Silent silver and black. I never left. Yet I walked a thousand years.