The Starting Line

She is tied to the tremor of a rhythm that never arrives.

This quote has been resurfacing again and again and again in the last six months.

It first entered my life like a bomb in my twenties, when I was tortured with the uncertainties of youth, and I felt as though I perpetually belonged somewhere else. Back then it came to me as a comfort, that I was not the only one who felt the beat of belonging but had not yet found the source. It blanketed my despair with the alleviation of recognition. There was someone, somewhere who felt exactly the same way as I did. I quoted it a multitude of times, in tearful confessions to my closest friends, to newfound mates after many drinks deep in dark bars,  to myself. I scribbled it on the cover of my journals, even contemplated getting it tattooed on my arm. It was my anthem.

It largely disappeared from my consciousness in my thirties. It would surface at times, but the feeling it left in its wake was not one of despair but one of hope. I was getting closer, that tremor was getting louder. I believed that although my rhythm had not yet arrived, it was bound by blood to one day.

It's most recent arrival was six months ago as I sat tearfully on the couch in my therapist's office wondering how to find the parts of myself that I had lost. It came back with crystalized clarity and shot out of my mouth with  such familiarity I was surprised at how much impact it still carried. It was then that I was offered an alternate interpretation to the grasp this quote had on me. Maybe, instead of a mournful cry for belonging, it was a description of the one place I have always felt at home and that all it would take to find myself again was to go back there.

High in the mountains there is a break in the earth and water, clear and cold, falls out. It has no choice but to drop, pebble by stone by rock by ridge down and down and down. It comes with an ancient tempo, unique yet recognizable, it pulses to a cadence that can not be clocked and can not be stopped. With an eternal pace it is always, at every moment, present but never arriving. It is the river.