January passed me by with bitter winds and reflection. Remnants of the season discarded with sentiments of peace and goodwill, the same sentences on loop. 

Familiar faces that didn’t fade with time  still acknowledge my existence , the time between regardless. Roads ahead are smoother somehow and I long for the light of spring. 

There is no life without change, without willingness to embrace a future unforeseen. No path is mapped, no promises set in stone.

He carved a name into the oak like a whisper in history. My fingertips trace its outlines of familiarity like a part of him remains unabated, embedded here. 

Silence fills the mind and the lessons of a lifetime swathe me without regret. Only in abandonment can love be given honestly, completely.

I take comfort in the solitary spark that rises from the dying embers. Its path unclear, but its brightness brings warmth to the darkest sky as the memory becomes a star.

Were there times to rival these, bitterness seems to have grown fangs. Days uncoil like a venomous rage. I’ve become an onlooker, a bystander stepping out of the cauldron only to witness the world implode. 

Reverberations quake, repetition has never been so repetitive. Looking down is the new standing up. We’re an app away from awesomeness, the promise land with  LCD display. Whole lives crammed onto memory sticks just plug it in and play. Happiness is the thing that exists behind you, that goes ignored while you sit almost rooted to the screen. Wired up and clueless. Can’t exist without it, can’t live with it. 

From the headland you can feel the weather turn. You can be blindfolded, but aware that the storm is just hours away. I used to fear the wind, it’s power lashing the land, but its beauty completely escaped me. 

Now I watch the azure turn to grey as the clouds build on the horizon. White horses become wild stallions unleashed, untamed. I feel at home, embracing the storm. A sense of belonging like I was made from this, for this.

My hair whips my face now wet from the spray, a thousand tiny lashes almost electrical. I survey my surroundings with a sense excitement, no money on earth could buy this. 

Wild is the feeling that you can’t explain. The city doesn’t understand, landlocked dreams of semi-detached importance. Wild is the place where I want to remain. 

Finally amidst the chaos came a fork in the road. A standstill, time to assess. For what seems like forever I’ve felt like part of an experiment. A puppet in someone else’s hands. 

The fork: This way or that way. Neither forward nor reverse, but left or right. Everyday there’s been less of me, slowly I’ve been fading into this creation, unwittingly following the carefully manufactured lines. 

Logging in, logging out. Trying to convince myself that it’s all part of progress. It isn’t. The fork is just a metaphor, a stage reached, a point of change. 

I held a dying creature in my arms and felt it leave this existence. Turning points always have a catalyst, a defining moment. Like a lightning bolt through your life. 

I realise how so many things that once seemed important are just flotsam and jetsam. How you give so much of yourself over to the competition, you get lost in it. 

My fork in the road: Isn’t forgetting what’s past, but putting to bed what can’t be altered and making changes to what can, because living vicariously is not living at all.