“Are you afraid to be left alone?”, she asks with inherent curiosity?
I have been living on the street for the fifth day as part of a twelve-day experiment to understand the life around here. I meet Mel standing in a soup kitchen line during a sweltering London morning and we have struck up a quick friendship. She is a recovering drug addict, a mother of two, divorced a couple of years back, and has been single ever since. Her husband took the kids away because she couldn’t stay sober, court orders, and all.
“My best friend just got engaged and now I am left alone as the last of the single in my group. I fear that I will die alone, with my little hamster”, she laughs a nervous laugh, yet there is a ring of fear behind it.
I try to find the appropriate words but then I look into her eyes.
There is a sense of immense sadness in them, the feeling of missing out on something good. The feeling of being left behind.
Everyone dies alone in their own cauldron. Your death will be no more or less gruesome than any others and happiness is a thing that passes through you, not a thing that you meet and hold in your deathly grip forever afterward.
You are afraid of being the last at a party without the others, while the others have gone into the woods they don’t understand.
They are the same woods you stand in, weeping, and the trees look at all of you the same and say nothing.
Stop asking questions you should be answering.
You already have those answers within you.
Give a little piece of yourself to everyone, and in doing so, let those pieces come back to you -
Exponentially multiplied……
