She Came Back Home

And so she returned,
warily at first,
but with each day it became apparent that the magic wasn’t leaving,
that the blinking eyes of the night owl still guided her path,
even when she wasn’t paying attention. Especially when
she wasn’t paying attention.

So she let her guard down,
and allowed the smiles of passersby and uncertainty to penetrate her being,
allowed the world to make her a little lighter,
allowed perfection to fall by the wayside. She gave the universe permission
to solve her problems,
which were never even problems to begin with.
And the angels worked in the shadows on her behalf. Sometimes they even came out
and named themselves.

She skipped through the streets – in the rain and without an umbrella,
waiting for the light to turn and noticing the same sights
with more loving eyes. The same people with more gratitude,
and the same pains with more wisdom. Maybe even letting them
whisper to her without covering her ears.

She had tried it all.. to respond to each pain one by one,
to pick just one and ignore the others, and perhaps most in vain,
she had tried to pretend she didn’t know them at all.
But it was clear she had a calling, and instead of chasing it,
she was going to let it find her. She had a voice
that didn’t like to be muted, and when she was too quiet,
it begged her to speak. When she was filling the silence with too many words,
it guided her to listen and be still instead.

She had been in draft mode for so long,
and now was more like a revised copy. Maybe even version 3.2.
With little edits here and there,
red ink splattered mercilessly,
comments to herself and others waiting for feedback.

She came back home. She opened her book,
and began to read, and her world was no longer her own.
The words melded into her being,
and she became friends with souls she had never met,
whose story mirrored her own.