Outside the Box

My entire life is packaged into a neat 10' x 12' box, a tiny room stuffed with books, photographs, pointe shoes, a glass heart, my favorite sweatshirt. Is this all I have done? Why do my memories seem so few, so small, enclosed in these four walls? 

I realize that the footprints of my life, moments of joy and failure, laughter and grief, do not accumulate in stuff, that I carry them within me - and yet I still feel more and more lately that I should have lived larger, fuller, braver, that I let so many moments pass me by. I have always had this prissy tendency to be small and safe and tidy (my ballet teachers will emphatically agree). But the life - that colorful, heartfelt, dauntless kind of living - lies in the chances, the messes, the mistakes. Looking back, I regret very few things I did, and countless more I didn't do. 

I wish I had danced my heart out at that audition, I wish I had kissed that boy, I wish I had bought that plane ticket and ran off to Europe alone, I wish I had walked away, I wish I had come home...

And now: I want to take leaps, make scenes, love with abandon, act on impulse - much, much more than I have so far. I want to fill this room with Italian artwork, tattered love letters, sand-filled seashells, concert t-shirts, stamped passports. I want to get carried away. I'm sure I will leave messes and mistakes in my wake, but they'll be all tangled up with surprises and road trips and sunsets and kisses - they'll be so worth it.  
 

"Men who never get carried away should be." - Malcolm Forbes

Burning Soul

... and suddenly, in the still, quiet moments, I feel it: a tiny orange flame, slowly burning off the last of the ruins. Soon there will be just an empty space, waiting to be filled again. An expanse of possibility, a place to stretch my limbs, to feel free and light and uncaged. A place to reach into a reverie. A place to pull him back to me. I can build anything I want there - a sandcastle, a temple, a cocoon, a bed. I will paper the walls with bliss, bits of music and laughter and poems and wine, and paint the ceiling with stars, and live an eternal dream...