Lights On

The first night I had to sleep in my own apartment was a surreal night. It was a Deja-vu, a flash back, a repeat of three years ago.

Despite being exhausted, disappointed, I found myself disillusioned, I as I crawled into my what felt like a makeshift bed, a hot wave of past rolled over this past Monday; just like three years ago. When I closed my eyes, I couldn't tell the point in time we were, it could have been 2009, or it could have been 2012 for all I knew. My emotions were exactly the same in both points in time. Everything I had come to believe had been shattered, just like that night three years ago. For a moment there, I had just found myself alone, lonelier than I had ever been. So, lonely, I had become, lonely I had been. So, there I was, I had to face a new truth and learn to brave myself. Fortunately for me, this time around, I woke up early, with a brave face and decided to challenge my own toils and face them head on, as much as I could, with my own capabilities. That's right, it felt like my very first night in my own apartment in Madison. The first time I truly ventured out on my own and had to learn to live by myself. A big feat for me, even today I love to think to myself that was something I had established and accomplished.

Three years ago, I faced the biggest disappointment of my life. With a single touch my heart was shattered into billion pieces. Now that aside, the wounds have healed and it's just a part of my past, like all other days of my past, precisely because it has made me the person I have become today. I am stronger because of it.

Last Monday, I met yet another heart breaking disappointment that was enchanted with so many illusions, beliefs. Disillusionment are difficult and tough to swallow. Regardless though, they toughen your skin each time and you learn to be an adult. Yes, disillusions are part of rites of passages into adulthood, without them our transitions from teenagers into adults would not be complete.  We believe in changes as we should. Only if people truly changed as much as they had thought or wanted to make others believe in it.

It felt like the small walls of my insignificant apartment walls caved in, crumbled under the pressure as I was a loss in darkness. Just like then, I had just finished cleaning, my eyes were bright red and swollen from crying and with an ache that had no balm at the moment. This time was different though. This time, I was missing my mom tremendously. So tremendously that, I had to leave my lights on. I felt like I would get loss and never wake up on my own bed again if I turned off the lights. Me, who wouldn't even let my her parents leave the lights on when she was a kid, I had to leave the lights on, just like that night three years ago. My dingy little lamp became my light of hope, as my mother was. It allowed me to go back to sleep once more. Though, at this point I was too scared to turn off the light that I wouldn't let it dare to cross my mind.

No matter how old we get, sometimes all we need are the lights in our lives to hold our hands tightly in more than the physical world.