Through the Looking Glass 2010

Through The Looking Glass 2010
I’m not Alice, this isn’t Louis Carroll’s looking glass, but I am definitely seeing what has been on the other side of my looking glass. I’m 49 years old, yesterday, and I have not a lot to show for it. I have keepsakes of a life of alone. I’ve had loves, and lost them. I collect crap, key rings, ornaments, and cats. Oh yeah the cats, the joke is I am going to die the crazy old cat lady from down the street and no one will know I am gone until some strangers smells the decay and finds the cats have been feasting on me. Except for me it’s never really been a joke, it was what I thought my future held. I live with my mother. I am unemployed and have barely ever been self-sufficient in my life. For twenty-seven years of college I have one AA degree and one BA degree, and no work that I can do with either. I have a collection of poems, essays, and short stories I am too afraid to attempt to publish. I take care of my mother in that I make certain she takes her meds,eats and sleeps. I have no one to leave a single thing to. I have no life to show for the years I have lived. And until a few days ago, I thought I had no soul mate, no future outside of getting another degree and more student loan debt and hopefully teaching college.
I fell through the mirror in a sense when a very cute woman answered my personal ad. We have talked and talked; she talks and I listen. I talk, she listens. We both write, from the heart. Our chosen art forms are actually quite different; hers is visual and tactile, painting texture of the world with her photography. I show the texture of the world in words, emotions, wearing my world, my heart, not so much on my sleeve, as on a page of paper coated in a gloss of words.
Our lives have taken similar turns, too many for it to be coincidence, but then not one thing happens by accident. It’s like these winding highways, side by side, twisting, turning, coming close to touching, then swerving off. Circumstances so similar at times, and then not, but the feelings, experiences, so similar it is uncanny. We have travelled life’s highway and never known that on the other side of a mirror each of us had a cosmic twinling.
We met, amazing conversation. So cute, such deep green eyes, they smile at me, the eyes, they see me, inside me, and they are not afraid of who I am; we speak, eyes to eyes, silently deafening. How can I begin to tell you how this makes me feel? I am not alone, there is another, like me, life lived, with ups and downs, good times and bad, but alone and lonely in our 40’s. Cat ladies, writers, artists, creators, magical beings of pure and perfect light, Fishes swimming in the same ocean, we belong.
She speaks of a magical grandmother and I smile, mine was magic in her way too. I hear, in my heart, the voice of my grandfather, super human, loving man who never hurt me, “I sent her to you.” I am crying because his voice has not come to my heart in at least 5 years. He passed in 1994. I miss him every day. He was my hero, my pal, my very special Papa.
She had an aunt, Zell, who was so very special to her and she felt lost when she lost her. I felt lost when I lost my Papa. I was nearly catatonic for 3 days after his death. She was the same over her aunt.
So here it is, this woman has been on the other side of my looking glass, not in wonderland, but certainly wonderful, and I just needed a nudge from the right direction to fall into that looking glass and find her there. No mad hatter, no tea party, no white rabbit, just a teen who told me where to look.