Between two lives – A poem (+ photos)

Have you seen the clouds today?
Have your eyes swam through the sky?
I realise as my head tilts back,
The clouds are connecting my two lives.

My feet have been hurting lately…
A dull ache running over the arches,
Leaving the curves with rusted edges
Like the leafless winter branches.

Maybe it’s from my tireless treks
Between two separate sides of now –
A disjointed kind of present,
That has fractured home somehow.

I imagine sitting on the edge of a cloud
Looking down from a hazy skyline.
I see her, (myself) lost in a liminal space
Crossing the bridge between two minds.

I’m cyclically slipping between two selves,
Like shifting among real and dreaming states.
But with each transition, the certain grows obscure
Though in both worlds I feel just as awake.

Memories of the two are jumbled,
A dizzying kaleidoscope of days and nights.
Some recollections are captured in colour
While others are thought in black and white.

There’s a sense of desperation for one
Or the other, or at least some roots or focus.
Instead of floating halfway between here and there –
I’d call it nowhere, does that sound too hopeless?

I look to the clouds and imagine again
I’m watching the uncertain footsteps I leave.
And from above I can see that I am less lost,
More conflicted between lives interweaved.

I crave certainty in that which consumes me,
And I fear in change both hands are being pulled.
Yet I’m both filling a void and creating one –
Two parts half empty and neither part full.

But the clouds told me ‘there is no emptiness
Or void, and when we decide to disappear,
The space is filled back up with atmosphere.
Nothing is never nothing,
This is no disastrous discomfort, my dear.

It’s all a part of life’s flux, the growing pains,
the stiffening ache – perhaps just the body’s lullaby.
Stop trying to move while curled and cocooned
Just rest before becoming a butterfly.’

Lately I’ve been feeling kind of like I have two lives that I switch between. I’d say it’s a fairly normal thing for people my age to go through, as I slowly start to become more independent and start own life with new friendships and relationships and experiences. I’m just going through (it would seem quite a long) transition period, where I’m dipping my toes into a new stage of life, but not quite leaving the waters of the old one. But I’m finding it difficult to integrate the two stages together because I feel as though when I spend time away from home, I’m completely leaving it behind. It just feels like I am escaping into a second life, or into a dream. Anyway, I wrote that poem to document this feeling, and I suppose to find comfort within the trials and tribulations of it. And I have included these photos that I quite like, not that represent the feeling, but from around a time when I felt it.