This time feels like redemption. 

This time feels like a triumph and we haven’t even quite begun. 

The first big trip we did quite literally on a wing and a prayer. 

Full of idealism and dare I say it, a unknowing hint of white saviourism.

The second we were flush with new business. Ambitious, burgeoning and struggling with more growing pains than I can even share. 

There were many times between. Almost nine years of time which seems impossibly long.

We dreamt up adventures over and over again, but we were isolated.

Shut in. Shut out. 

Meanwhile, we have consolidated and built. 

Expanding, growing children, larger by the day it seems, meanwhile, I've been getting leaner.

I have dropped more physical weight than I knew I could and somehow the emotional and spiritual baggage lost was more than 10x that. 

I’ve faced the devil and cut the fucker out for good. 

I’ve called for myself and let her in again. 

Meanwhile, they have commented how this new way I’m talking makes them sad.
Good girls don’t curse. They don’t talk about sex. They don’t walk away like I did. 

But I knew all along. 

This is not a surprise to me.
This was always going to happen. Because wild is not something you put on.

It lives inside you and you can only cage it so long.

Sometimes though, even for wild things, waking is a slow process. The light filters in and half shut, groggy eyes slowly make sense of the world around them.

Waking up looks like the unraveling of midlife. Dreaming in psychedelic colour for the first time and wondering how you never knew it could be this good.

We are older, I hope wiser, but I suspect we are really just beginning sometimes. 

Ready for the hot sun that never quite burns. 

For the language that makes me feel like a child and gives me a whole new life.

Ready to walk hand in hand with my loves.
Slowly, with eyes wide open, wondering if it can all be true. Knowing it to be so. 

Awake and Dreaming. Again.