Breakfast at Tiffany's

It all started with my bff, and a song, Moon River, one of her favorites. Seeing how she loved the song, I searched out its origin, and found that it was composed for the film Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn in 1961. Breakfast at Tiffany's. I know I had read it once, standing on the threshold from teenage into adulthood. It's more than ten years on now, but I soon found myself deep in the pages of the book, somewhat embarrassed and surprised.

Holly Golightly is nineteen, footloose, free-spirited, searching and desperately wants to belong somewhere. Yet she's also fiercely idealistic, tender-hearted and extremely vulnerable. As for me, I am more than ten years older, married, established in my career, and have got it all sorted regarding how I should live, and why. I know where I belong. Surely?

I was embarrassed and surprised at how much I could identify with Holly, even though surely by now I must have grown out of all that adolescent angst. I hope. And it is partly true that I have. In Holly it is largely a reflection I see, but not simply a reflection as in a mirror. Instead, the experience is more like standing on the banks of a river, watching the current carry a series of images downstream, not quite snapshots of my life, but each reminiscent of something.

There was that search for a place to belong, with the many mirage-like moments of having found it. There was that sense of futility and transience in each illusive dream promising only false hope. And yes, there were anxiety attacks a-plenty, like the "mean reds" which sent Holly flying to Tiffany's, a place where "nothing very bad could happen to you". My bff has witnessed how I have made wastelands of destruction out of desperation when my version of the "mean reds" hit. Knowing the stories of some of my friends, I know that I am not the only who would identify with Holly.

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Holly drifts, yet hers is a purposeful drifting guided by her heart. She knows just how she'll feel when she's finally "home".

I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like... it's like Tiffany's. ... It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there.  

If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name. 

Near the end of the book, Holly leaves for Brazil, still drifting. In her usual dramatic, hot-headed fashion, Holly throws her nameless cat that she never felt belonged to her out of a cab window in Harlem on the way to the airport, and regrets it moments later. The narrator promises to return to search the cat out, and does so successfully one day. The book closes with the image of the cat in a Harlem window, "flanked by potted plants and framed by clean lace curtains... seated in the window of a warm-looking room", clearly having found that place of belonging." I hope Holly has, too", the narrator concludes, and the reader hopes on, too.

"And where is home?" I remember a friend asking some years back, when I told him that I was on a search for such a place. I can't quite remember how I answered him. I do know, however, that the disappointments, heartbreaks, losses, broken relationships, shattered dreams the years of drifting have brought did not come without the gifts of a surer faith in the the goodness of God and His sovereignty, a deeper knowledge of His love, and the certainty that I am being changed daily to reflect the character of my  loving Lord Jesus Christ.

For now, home is not heaven. Instead, it is the deep knowledge that I belong to God who bought me with the priceless blood of His Son. My identity is as His child, secure in His unfailing love. My story makes sense, but only in the light of His wisdom, a wisdom sometimes beyond the understanding of my finite mind. So daily, moment by moment (especially when the "mean reds" come), I run home. My soul yearned for satisfaction those drifting years. It will continue to yearn forever. Only, now, I know the object of its yearning, and to whom I belong.

There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the creator, made known through Jesus. - Blaise Pascal