Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

by Aspen Matis

“Every person exists in their own shallow bowl, and they can’t see over the rim,” he explained. “But they think that their world is the world—the truth. When in reality, no two bowls are identical, and all people are stuck trapped in their own.”

powdery and weak—frightening and uncomfortable to touch—is the source of regeneration, the productive part of the flower of the soul. The pistil, central and hidden, contains potential kernels of new life’s creation, a fragile stalk arising from the swollen bulb of seeds to a pollen-receptive tip, the stigma, variously shaped as the human spirit itself.

An experience of discomfort by design, the act of vulnerability is an access, a portal to more-profound connection. And bold honesty, this terrifying method of self-exposure, is also the medium for enriched and strengthened bonds.

Because—as I’d discovered—loneliness is not a function of company, but rather it is a consequence: an unpleasant symptom of a needy state of mind that desperately seeks to extract happiness from a source outside itself.