That Was The Story of My Life

I've long had the idea that we come into the world with some vague plan, a faintly drawn map with general directions marked and junctions to be met. I also have the idea that you can the take the wrong exit, or miss a turn-off and get hopelessly lost, stuck with no way back until conditions arise to get you to where you were meant to go. I know what it's like to be stuck, and I know what it's like to stumble, almost accidentally, back onto the path. 

There have been three times in my life that I've been aware of being lost, knowing there was some invisible turn I'd failed to make, leaving my existence to unspool uselessly like a film that had jumped its sprockets. The first two were distinct moments of knowing something had gone wrong, the third was a slower knowledge, a growing realization that all efforts to change my circumstance had come to naught. In each case, the sense of an unlived life haunted me, unseen but present like a prickle down my spine.

In other words, it was a lot like being under a hex, but knowing all the while that I'd somehow hexed myself. 

So it came to pass that, realizing the gravity of my situation, I decided I needed to be unhexed. At first this might seem a tall order, but it turned out to be as easy as waking in the night knowing it could be done. While I didn't have the map of my future, I did have the map of my past, so it was quite a simple matter - methodically, secretly, intentionally unwinding my life from the nodes of fate that had held me fast. (How I did it, I might tell you one day, but not yet, not yet.) As it happened, it felt natural, really; like laughter, a new memory that overtakes old sorrow, the chill of significance now pleasantly warm. No longer haunted, always half somewhere else, for those moments - the tiniest sliver of time - I had an idea of what it must be like to be normal.

Unravelling the warp and weft of my previous life, I see now how teenage dreams were only precognitions of this moment, the eerie chill merely signaling a memory that hadn't happened yet. Not without a certain melancholy do I watch the loose threads blow away, the comfortable discomfort of the familiar past. What is left behind is a path to the truly unknown, and beyond that, a future - whatever it might be - to be lived in the present tense at last. 

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