I hold the steering wheel of my car and look to the horizon. The chapter of my life that I've just closed drives me forward, and I feel the need to start the next one like a whisper at the base of my neck. Shhh
I feel the void of finishing a book and the urgency for the next to be just as intense. The void of fullness. I take it all with me. I don't want anything else, but at the same time the gulf calls. It's an unknown place that I no longer fear because every single achievement in my life has come from there; from going into the darkness, adapting to it and discovering the lights, nuances and galaxies that I would never have seen if I hadn't taken that first step.
A yes going forward - that's how I define this moment. A yes to whatever presents itself, whatever I find, whatever crops up and moves me. Yes to colours, shapes, flavours; to the new and the old seen with new eyes. To what I don't like but decide to give a chance. Yes to listening to the heartbeat of other lives and making them my own. Yes to sitting down at strangers' tables, yes to turning up at the door of old friends and dancing again to the tune of our earlier lives. Yes to adding, multiplying, growing exponentially. Growing and starting again, as often as I need.
I have with me my spirits, my stories, my certainty that you never fall so much that you can't get back up. All of this is with me at the wheel.
Sometimes I have background music on - the notes that take me back to one of yesterday's chapters or the drums pushing me forward to the future abyss, or there is total silence, marking the rhythm of my breathing now. Today, here and now.
Suddenly, the urgent need to stop. To hit the brakes and conquer this corner right here where I am. Here, ground that nobody before has ever stepped on the way I can. Nobody has breathed it in like me, or filled it with my experiences. I stop the car and make it mine. I get out, walk, feel, breathe, sing and conquer. I plant my flag. I stick it in this place and in this moment forever. It ripples like a sentence underlined in a book. Here was Manuela. Here I left my whole self for a moment. Here, like nobody before me, Lo de Manuela.
For the moment this is the only way I want to start. With sensations. Like air on skin.
