Importance.

Sometimes, there are people who come into your life unexpectedly. These people are different than others. Important in some way...for some reason. You look at them and there is a closeness to self, a sameness. An instinctive undersatnding. Sometimes these people stay and you are able to discover just what significance they have in your life. Others go away and the memory of them fades with time. You no longer remember how you could look into their eyes and see bits and pieces of yourself mixed in with other things that were foreign, strange, exciting. Instead they just become a name from some long forgotten past life. A chance that you could have had--a choice--that passed.
There's someone like that in my life right now. I don't know why. I can't really explain it. But I just know that this perosn is important to me. It's instinctive. But what will happen? This person will move on, go away, and become someone that I used to know, once, from that one place I lived for a short time.
I wonder sometimes if people ever feel this, too. If I ever show up and someone thinks, "Wow....do I know her? I sure want to. She's important."
Maybe it's just that I haven't lived enough life, yet, to see these things come full circle. Maybe, someday, all these important people who have crossed my path will some day show themselves again and then, finally, I'll understand those feelings. Or maybe these people really do represent the opportunities that my life could have were I to make a different choice.
But what if I were to fight for some of these people? I have before. And never won. But the people who have been important (and, I mean more than familiar....more than friends. Really IMPORTANT. I don't know of a different way to describe it...) who have stayed of their own choice? Man....have they been impactful.
I don't really know where I'm going with this....except that it's interesting to wonder and think about. If yesterday could happen again and if I had been different or the situations had been somehow different...if not my own choice but that of an important person had been different, how would I be different now? ....would I be having these thoughts about how important people are to me in life? Or would I just know that, to someone, I'm that important person, too.
What-ifs are useless unless you put them into a practice for our future.

If an obsticle is what keeps you apart, then what ever could be strong enough to keep you together?

The Phantom of the Opera

How completely different would we view The Phantom of the Opera if instead of the phantom being a large, imposing man with seductive prowess he was instead Christine's alter-ego. Picture it. She's singing into her mirror "Look at your face in the mirror--I am here inside" and for once Christine realizes that the person who has been causing these mysterious happenings around the opera house is her. The person who duals Raul in the graveyard is actually Christine herself--posessed by a power that she, because of her other weaker personality--is unable to override. Because of some abuse in her childhood or some other tragedy (the death of her father, perhaps?) she becomes the phantom. One part in the play she sings "I am the mask you wear" (when she is taken to the dungeon for the first time)...she wear that mask--the guise of Christine so that she can operate in the real world--but the source of her genius is the derangement of her mind. The whole show, then, becomes a struggle of self--rather than good against evil. It isn't until Raul says that he would do anything for her--and attempts to prove it (or perhaps that is also one of her mad dreams?) that she finally is able to let go of the phantom inside her and she is free to be the mask that she has shown to the world--however incommplete that makes her, and however painful the death/distruction/disappearance of the phantom will be.

Is that the lesson of the Phantom of the Opera? Or is it really just two really attractive (who cares about a little bit of face distortion, anyway? Have you SEEN me in the morning??) guys with amazing voices going after the same non-commital girl? Bad boy vs. good girl dillema?

Perhaps we all have a bit of the Phantom in our own minds....

What is familiarity? Sometimes I feel like I get so comfortable sitting in the same spot, night after night, that when I actually take time, to open my eyes and see the world around me, I realize that it is alien. Strange. Not at all what I thought it to be. It's that familiar face that you never noticed had a scar....the familiar road with the house you've never seen. I have this feeling that, despite being completely aware of my immediate surroundings, it is most definitely not mine--most definitely not familiar as I would have myself believe. Most definitely not how I view it.
What is it about perspective? It is the view with which we see the world and make it ours. Step out of that for a minute. Then what do you see? Perhaps, when we step out, we realize that we never actually saw at all?

Birthright

Do you ever wonder, if your parents hadn't gotten together--if your mother had married/been with someone else, or your father--who you would've been with? Who you as your own unique spirit would have been sent to as part of their family? Your mother? Or your father? Or would you be in a completely different family? With completely different people? As if your name was never called from the queue? How would that this life--my life--be different if the people who gave it to me had chosen differently?