A vision quest is calling me.

My relationship with Flame is wonderful– forever inspiring, challenging, exciting. I wouldn’t marry for my own sake, but recent discussions have made me realize that it’s not for people like me that marriage exists, and commitment for life isn’t for eternity anyway, right?

Whenever I imagine proposing to Flame, I feel this father figure welling up within me, like a personification of a van Gennep rite of passage. The figure is my father, though not quite as he looks in my one picture of him. He died when I was 10 and he was 34, but he is a part of me in so many ways.

People are said to become more like their parents on the other side of this particular rite, and I wonder what that will mean for me. I’m proud to consider myself an adult already, and have for years, but rites of passage are powerful. Who is this man inside me? I remember very little of him, and I only know fragments from what others have told me. When he appears, what will be come of me? I need to know who he was at my age.

My quest is to find my father, by talking to those who knew him. The door ahead scares me a little, but I will approach it with caution.