Somewhere

Her life had become a mess all of a sudden, and if there was one thing Nora hated more than anything in the world, it was mess. She didn’t cope well in chaos- she felt unbalanced. 

Her days felt too long, and she couldn’t sleep without waking up with something on her mind, or perhaps we should say someone was on her mind. She tried everything to keep herself distracted, sleeping in late, going to the gym, reading till her eyes felt like bleeding. But it was never enough. 

So that’s when she decided to take a walk. Now, you should be aware, that this walk had no real destination because at the moment Nora’s life didn’t feel like her own, and if she didn’t own her life, then how could she possibly determine where it was going? 

But she had decided one thing: she was going somewhere.

It was late when she made this decision, almost eleven o clock at night. But she didn’t care, she had no job to get up for in the morning. She didn’t take music because she wanted the time to let her mind wander, in the same way her body aimlessly ambled down the street. Nora had to have walked for almost an hour when she finally stopped to look around. The sky was almost dark but the sun seemed to linger, lightening the darkest night into an almost greyish hue. 

It seemed fitting really. That the sky would appear grey at the exact time in Nora’s life where she felt grey herself. In-between. Undecided. Lost. 

The moon looked like a sickle, hanging in the sky so precariously it was a wonder that it didn’t just fall right at Nora’s feet. It was beautiful really, if you liked that kind of thing: incomplete, half-full, longing. 

 But as Nora stared at the moon, and let me tell you, she stared at it for quite a long time, her mind started to calm down, and her life seemed to become less chaotic, less blurry, less messy. As she stood, miles from home, on her own, under the night sky, she realised that only from the mess that surrounded her, could she make something out of it. If all of life was like the quiet stillness of the sickle moon, life would seem empty. 

So as she made her way back, she made herself a promise: not to be overwhelmed by the chaos, not to surrender to the churning mass of emotions that overtook her on a daily basis, but to swim instead of drown, to live instead of coast. 

***

And weeks later, on the new moon, when the moon had returned in all her glory, Nora smiled because she knew that like the moon, change was coming for her soon. And she felt refreshed by that.