Connection

I believed the little boy in me was dead. I was wrong. This is the true story of the day I found him again, and everything that changed after.  

There was a time I believed the little boy in me was dead. Not gone missing. Not hiding. Dead. Beaten out of me. Slapped out of me. Starved out of me the day I tried to kill myself. I’m not here to drag you back through all that. It’s done. It lives where it belongs now — in the past, and in the pages of the book.

This is something else. This is a happy little story. A story about redemption. About reconciliation. About finding something I thought I’d buried forever. About the day I found him again.

I’d lived most of my life believing the child had gone and I’d travelled along life’s long road without him. Not exactly true, as it turns out.

I took up yoga in my later years, mainly at first so I could put my socks on standing up.But along with the physical study of stretching, strength and movement comes something else for free: the study of mindfulness.

Those quiet moments, moments I’d never experienced in all my life, carried with them not just a quick chance of peace and quiet but something much more powerful.

Clarity.

The short moments in my head when everything fits together, everything makes sense.

It had been suggested to me that maybe little Rich might not be gone forever, just missing.

So this is what happened to us that wet grey afternoon in my bedroom, laying on my yoga mat.

Eyes shut, laying down flat, comfortable, observing my breathing. Not changing anything, just watching, noticing my ribs rise and fall with the motion of my body taking in air.

Then starting to control what came in and out, thinking only about that until my mind was clear, thinking about nothing but the candle I’d lit in my mind and the breath going in and out.

Then suddenly adult me was standing outside little Rich’s flat in Wood Green.

I walked through the main entrance door.

Two flats with green front doors, one left, one right.

I walked up the steep steps to the two flats upstairs, chose the one on the right.

Pulled up the mat and there was the front door key where it always was.

Opening the front door and turning left into the kitchen was strange.

It was clean, tidy, quiet.

Really quiet.

Nobody was home, just me all alone.

I looked around the kitchen, and nothing had changed, except the atmosphere.

So quiet and peaceful.

Nothing like the chaos and filthy stink it was when I truly was there last, there in body.

I went into the bedroom at the back, the tiny bedroom shared with my brother when we were young.

There was an airing cupboard I used to climb into at night, when my body was skinny enough to easily fit on the shelf with the never-lit boiler behind me, to take refuge from the noise or the painfully uncomfortable “bed” I was forced to try to sleep on every night when I was young.

I opened that cupboard door in my meditation and there he was.

Little boy Rich.

Staring back at me. Dirty, sad, scared.

I held out a hand for him and he took it.

I told him I was sorry for leaving him all alone all these years.

I asked him if he could forgive me for not having the strength to stick with him.

He said of course he could.

I gave him a cuddle and he cried.

I opened my eyes slowly on my yoga mat and came back into the room.

It was me that was crying.

I was crying because I felt a wave, a massive wave of happiness and relief.

A weight had been lifted from my soul.

My inner child was back.

The boy I thought dead all those years was back with me.

The following day I truly felt different. More positive.

Not bursting with all the joys of spring, but happy. Playful even.

Back at work the next day, when the boss asked me if I’d finished all my work, I replied, that’s for me to know and you to find out, so nerrr — not in a nasty way, just for fun.

On the way out I caught a reflection in the long glass door.

I stopped, just to look at it for a moment, smiled and said hello Rich.

The reflection poked his tongue out at me and smiled a huge smile.

A little something to listen to while reading .