Between the dreaming and the coming true

I just recently finished reading The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud and while engulfing each word written on each page as I leafed from one page to another, I felt apart of the story - the kind of feeling I don't usually feel after soaking in a good book.

But what managed to capture me by the neck and held me down to the floor was the similarity I felt with the character, Charlie. The similarity brought me back to when I was dealing with the death of a loved one, the awkwardness of being in love and the choice of holding on and letting go; the same things Charlie was facing.

And I remember that I did not take being in that dilemma so well. I was between having emotional turmoils and plastering a smile on my face so that the outside world would see that I was holding up (even when that was a very poor act at pretending to be okay). I'd rather not dive into the details.

At the end of this book, Ben Sherwoord describes the phase of the in-between - between heaven and earth, but he refers to it as paradise or nirvana - and the life after Charlie had let go. That's when I found myself smiling; smiling because I knew what it felt like to walk in his shoes and smiling because I've moved past that phase.

The loved one I lost was my grandfather (whom was like a father to me), the awkwardness of being in love was shared with an old flame and the choice of holding on and letting go had to be done in both of the situations I just mentioned.

Along that path of uncertainty, I managed to make a choice and have been living with it. Simply because sometimes, when you close one door, another one opens up.And sometimes, letting go and moving on is good.

A few years have gone by but I'd like to keep this a constant, "I live in the space between reality and dreams; death and life; holding on and letting go; and the past and the present".