Recovery

For the first time in some very dark ages, I feel the hope of recovering. "Recovery" is a strange word in that its Latin-to-Middle French counterpart implies other than the prefix and verb/noun today's native English speaker would automatically identify. Part of the problem is that I have been "covering" myself; doing so again would hardly help in any situation other than a dinosaur attack. Indeed, I have lived under fear of a dinosaur attack, of recurrent thoughts of my past and its ability to cause me nearly fatal wounds. In some sense, I do find the act of joining MySpace, of all saviours, one that shelters me and my desire to express freely that which I fear will provoke in my Blogger audience, small as it is (but then again, so were many of those Powerful Predators of the Past), and vise-versa. However, in embracing its original meaning, my recovery is based off of finding my identity, and I am not a lamp to be shaded! It is unfair to me and everyone else that I censer myself; I am one, as are we all. In looking at a disc of photos burned into my memory and hard drive, a collection I have so many times avoided viewing, I found myself falling back in time and, surprisingly, in love--not, as one and I would assume, with my ex, but with myself, like I knew this young woman, and I was falling in love for the very first time. As my eyes adjusted from their accustomed darkness, I was blinded by the glare of the light he saw in me, the light that used to be there. And even though I had snuffed out my flame with the suspicion he could not long tolerate the brightness, I felt it glow beneath the coals and soot enough to appreciate how he loved me in his own little way, how he is a beautiful artist with so much to give if he only knew how, and even though a few teary rainclouds haze my horizon at the memory of my wish and willingness to teach him, I can be glad of the flickering , faultering light on my way to the bonfire.