a hidden friend

During my life, I have had maybe one or two life-changing experiences. I know, I know; I am still young, but life is moving at a thousand miles per hour, and I never really took the time out to hold my breath for a few seconds to make sure I wasn’t missing anything really important. I spent my high school years battling rumors, evil girls, and discovering my passions for the literary art, but I never sat and watched a sunset, I never saw the snow, I never sat in a car on a rainy day just to watch the drops explode on my windshield. I spent most of my college years the same way. I went to class, came home. I never made any real friends, the kind that you make an effort to see, the kind that doesn’t screw you over for a guy, the kind that would stick by you when they said they would. Lets just say I have been kind of put off by the whole experience of life, or how they say you should live it. So I drifted. I floated from experience to experience, because I was programmed to believe that nothing good would come of it anyways.
Then I met you. And you taught me the beauty that is hidden in the cracks and crevices of this world that I have only seen hate and destruction in. I walked by you blindly, almost disgusted, because I have only ever seen the bad in people before I saw the good. I hoped for the best, but expected the worst. But when you go through life with the perspective that any day could be your last, and welcome it with open arms, because what kind of a heaven could there possibly be if this world, which is supposed to be so wonderful, is nothing but a giant disappointment, there is no point in actually getting out of bed in the morning for anything. So instead of walking by you a second time, I stopped to watch, and to admire, and to discover that not all things with seemingly ugly exteriors have bad hearts or rotten souls.
I watched you, and got to know you, because I thought I could learn something about how to really live. Because you lived with the perspective of every day could be my last, and I am going to fight like hell to see tomorrow. I learned that I too should fight for my life, and not what I was living, because that was really no life at all, but an encapsulating routine that was a bitch to break. I decided to fight for the type of life that I wanted, not the type of life I thought I should settle for.
Every day I sat with you as you worked, or bathed in the sun, and I told you the story of the life I had come to live. And as I told you of the hate and cruelty that had encompassed my daily routine, I could hear your heart break for me. Because I knew that you wanted me to be as happy as you were. You wanted me to find meaning in the little things, beauty in the not-so-beautiful, and love in the hate. Every morning you were the first face that I wanted to see after I left my house, and when you weren’t there, my heart broke a little. And when I thought I lost you, I found myself falling back into the same routine that I had started with. I had a hard time getting up in the morning and starting the day when I knew that you wouldn’t be there to catch me when I fell on my face.
I had almost lost hope until one night, one wonderful night, you snapped me back to reality. You grabbed my hand and said, “What the hell do you think you are doing?” and I knew that I had let you down. I was supposed to keep living, instead of emotionally killing myself. And I know now that you won’t always be around to keep me in check, so I have to do it for myself. I have to be sure that I am living each and every day to its fullest potential. You are the mother I always wanted to be, you are the fighter I never thought I could be, and you are the traveler that I will someday become. Because there, stretching from a small tree down to a stone post was the most beautifully crafted, and lovingly developed spiral spider web that I had ever seen, once again. And there in the center, hung upside-down was a beautiful yellow and black spotted spider with eight long red legs stretching out from the coin sized body. And when the winter set in, the mornings held a little more dew on the tips of the blades of grass and leaves on the trees, the days got a little shorter, I thought the sun had set on you. But, you sprung from the ashes and showed me that you were a soldier, and that I should be too. So now, I find myself consciously stepping around lines of ants, making time to appreciate the formations made by the clouds, and I live every day as if it were my last. And you better believe that I am going to fight like hell to see tomorrow.