Feet first, balanced on a ledge. Swinging free, slightly terrified, I sat in Rome. I was perched in a window a monk would have looked out of hundreds of years before me.  He would have seen the same other half of his monastery circling back around to loop into a place of refuge from the same city, the same streets I was looking at with younger eyes.  Everything was old—much older than myself. It didn’t know me, and I hardly knew it all.  But somehow that painful feeling of longing had followed me here. Followed me from my familiar trees and mountains, from the low long peculiar houses lining my street and the smell of warmth that comes from the sidewalks most of the year, from the shadows that I have memorized and the roof that I have made my lookout. I was still myself in another country. I did not leave any part of me behind. All that fills and had filled my soul traveled with me by plane that wintertime.

                  I do not think I can explain this, and I am not sure it was fully meant to be explained. Sometimes, I feel like I am alone in what I think and feel. Sometimes I wonder if other people are actually seeing the same things I am—I wonder if light is registered and perceived in their eyes the same way it is in mine. And even more importantly, I wonder if there is another person living who can feel this indescribable pain and longing that comes to me in short, sharp pangs when my eyes are most open and my soul is most exposed. As I have grown, however, I come to know more and more that this feeling must interrupt other people’s lives the same way it does mine.

One morning, as a Bon Iver song played, I watched heavy bruised clouds disintegrate the thin delicate layer of light grey that had covered the sky a few minutes earlier.  The music, the weather, the warmth of my car’s heater—all of these combined simply made me ache. It was as if I wanted to just press myself into this point in time, become a part of the clouds and the song, be in the middle of them.  But they fled from me, quick as anything—quick as they had come. I have learned that the reason they do not stay long enough for me to be a part of them, is simply because they are not a part of my world. Strictly speaking, they exist here, but only as moments, only as glimpses. The whole is for another time, or from another place. They are only allowed to grant me that aching feeling for a brief time; I cannot become a part of it.

I am doomed to be a bystander. I am forbidden from seeing anything more than the fleeing backside of these moments. It is like a person who lives on the border of a Faerie land; they may enter in this place that is not their own and stay for a time, but they must eventually return to earth. Earth: this little piece of rock floating in infinite space.  Earth is rain and breathing and getting sick; it is having to trim fingernails and shut doors and buy groceries. Being human means you must live on earth. Across the dividing line, Faerie land makes men into giants.  It is crisp seasons always on time, it is conversations with obvious meanings, it is a balanced mixture of good and evil, it is seeing clearly, it is confirmed feelings and finding the body to which the shadow belongs, it is even more real. When passing back and forth between the two places though, one finds that there grows inside a love for each in their own ways. Although Faerie is beautiful, I am not to live there.

I was born to live on this rock in space, I was not made to exist across the dividing line. I think that the times on earth that I experience this aching, this longing for beauty to remain, are glimpses of Faerie, windows only.  Either it is Faerie I long for, or it is Heaven. I think it may be both. I have a growing suspicion that Heaven is to Faerie what Faerie is to earth. With each, the window separating becomes clearer and less dim.

I am doomed to be a bystander. I am paradoxically blessed to only spend small times outside of my home, my dim reality. These moments spent with fleeing, aching feelings make my earthly and human eyes more clear. In returning to my getting sick, my growing fingernails, and my grocery buying, I learn to appreciate this earth more and more. I come to know simplicity and I come to love my own trees and mountains, houses and sidewalks, shadows and rooftops.  It is not my earth that is dim; in fact this rock is one of the most beautiful things God ever made. It is my eyes that have a film over them; my own self is preventing me from seeing clearly.

As a human being, I must learn to love the little rock I live on. It is my purpose, in a sense. I was placed here to learn how to appreciate and find beauty in my daily life—the same beauty that exists in those magnificent times contained in small moments. Once I can do this, my eyes will be clear enough to learn how to truly see the beauty in Faerie and not be overwhelmed. However, I think that I will still find that aching sting even across that dividing line. I think Faerie is found in between my earth and the true, clear, crisp reality that is Heaven. Thus, it is ever onward and upward. It is living with eyes held open; open enough to see the hole the tree creates to show the moon, open enough to see the reflection of window light traveling across the wall, open enough to see the small mountains in relation to the expanse of the sky. I will keep my eyes open, and my soul will continue to be filled. I will move from beauty to beauty knowing that the ache means me well; knowing that someday I will be able to fall into the middle of it all and just be.