Missing Pages

Do you ever get the feeling like something's missing? Not in the way of misplaced car keys or one's virginity but something from deep inside that self destructs into its own hole of nothingness, trying to fill that spot where the missing piece belongs.
How to describe it? Tell the girl at the lost property office or God on your knees in church. No, best to bury it further as an ostrich does in the sand. Afterall, how is anyone else to comprehend if it's nothing more than an inkling, a suggestion of poison to yourself?
As I grow older I learn more about myself that I have always known, just never had the sense or the maturity to realise or accept. My acting experience has blessed me with the ability to change masks, personas, often on command as though playing all 6 parts of the Commedia Dell'Arte. I can be a well-adjusted socialite, just one of the gang, a shoulder to cry on and prop you up when you fall. I become all of these things in fear of my own inadequacies. Because I've never been good with change, never popular or had a copious amount of friends and never felt as I could truly be saved if I fell (again).
But those metaphorical masks, they seem to reduce the force. The weight swinging from my heart, pulling myself down lessens, until I let down my guard.
I become so affected by things. By what people say, this season's clothes and what happens to characters on my favourite TV shows. I let these things in so they bother my nights, eating themselves into my subconscious.
There is everything wrong with the dark. It is the most revealing thing I know. You cannot hide from your mind, yet the terrors hide themselves. I believe in the supernatural and the living dead. I believe people can come back as ghosts, or as babies. Some people have been here before. These are the deep thinkers, the worldly and cultural people who don't have a passport. Sometimes they know, sometimes not, that they have walked the planet before this life.
Me? I always felt so naive and empty that I couldn't possibly lived earlier than 1987. All of those holes of nothingness within my soul are waiting to be imprinted in this life. It is up to me if I have the strength or the courage to inscribe on my heart.
But today, an ordinary midweek working day I felt (not even thought) that perhaps I have lived another life. I have mistaken those empty pages as a lack of history. Rather they represent what has been stolen. My troubled existence is spelt out clearly in invisible ink, for it is those weakened links and lost fragments that show just that - they are lost. The missing pieces of me have disintegrated into the past, each time stealing a part of my 21st century well being. And the biggest space of all is vacated by the catalyst for the hurt. What mothers and fathers all over the world break up their marriages and live a life of misery for. And I don't know if I can ever be able to replace it.

Mid flight ponderings

There are odd moments. Not every day and barely every week, that you remember things from the past and the feeling that joins it is so vivid you transport yourself there. To that time and location.
I can hear my mother's voice correcting my "yep" as she drove my brother and I to primary school; the both of us in the backseat of the car.
As I listen to Missy Higgins songs I remember sitting as a senior in the school library struggling to devise a drama performance. My journal was full of clippings, pictures, lyrics and poems. As I listen to her sing them I remember the page as I glue it in, reading them back to myself.
Flying makes me nervous; not because of the journey but anxiety about the destination. Often the initial departure is bound for somewhere far from home, but after a near 1000 kilometre move flying home, and I mean really home, brings on the usual feelings based on pure habit rather than actual worry.
I makes me think that we don't change at all. Not really. We are born as a tiny version of our present minds, and if we're lucky will add some cognitive degeneration before we die to soothe the life long pressure we have built upon.
Leopards can't change their spots. Nor Kitty her freckles.