Change is a beautiful thing.  I've not deleted a one of the facebook messages I received since I opened my facebook account.  Today, I felt this sudden urge to look back on very specific moments, very important messages that I remember as defining crossroads for myself: Here's what I discovered.

I've changed.  I've tried in many ways to change, and I've also tried to stay the same.  But change is inevitable.  I'm sometimes - no, always - an emotional person, and when the bucket is full of my heart's feelings, it just kind of pours out without looking twice to see if there's anything to catch the spilt water.  I've told lots of people that I love them in my messages.  In some cases, I've confessed attraction...sometimes, I've been on the edge of it... sometimes, a very deep connection has been intimated to me through some message.  Ah...

What do I feel right now?  Regret.  No.  Not regret.  Truth be told, so many of those people that I felt such a strong connection to don't feel so close to me anymore.  It's a sad...realistic truth.  Does that invalidate my emotions?  Does that mean that I should discredit the intensity of how much my heart goes out to someone simply because in a year or two I may not feel the intensity of that love?  Not at all.  I've discovered that there is a beauty in a moment.

Changes can happen in a moment.  And changes can happen over time.  But change is inevitable.  And so, with the knowledge that change will come, we can do one of two things: We can simply accept that the train will leave this station and board without a look back at those on the platform we're departing from... Or we can take photographs, we can hug just a little bit longer, we can afford to smile and not be afraid to be so vulnerable.

I choose vulnerability.  It is in my most vulnerable moments that I have discovered the greatest truths about myself.  It is in my most vulnerable moments that I suddenly respect myself as a human being.  In vulnerability, we confront change, we confront the force we are most afraid of.  Change is not a monster.  It is an inevitability.  Not good.  Not evil.  Simply existant.  And the beauty of life is recognize the tick-tock of change and to run into it with all the faith that it will not destroy what we were...it will only make us more what we are becoming.

I don't know how to think about fate anymore.  I'm not sure.  There were moments in the past when I was so sure of how everything would turn out.  But change had a different course to set me on.

I'm on a different course.  I run a new race.  But I'm not sure that there's a prize to be won.  I'm not so sure that the prize isn't the finish line... it's the scenery, perhaps.

If you are reading this, and I have ever told you that I loved you, know that it is true.  I loved you, and I still do.  I probably miss you.  I don't know if you miss me.  But the moment in which I felt that love, in which I made myself vulnerable to you, was a moment of great challenge and personal struggle for me.  Know that when I say I love you...I would not put myself through that nakedness unless I absolutely meant it.

Change will come.  But I will linger in this moment.  There is beauty in this moment.  And there will be beauty in the next.  But really... ah...there's no hurry.

Hold someone a little longer.  Look someone in the eyes longer than you're comfortable with.  Tell someone that you love them.  Dare to listen...to actually listen...to what someone has been waiting to say.  You'll find a strength in you that you didn't know was there.  You'll find a power in vulnerability.  A glorious paradox.

K R A W Z F I A R
   S   T   O   N   E