I’m conscious of every passing day. They tick by less like moons and more like minutes, moving me ever closer to more of the same. They say that every day is another chance to turn it around but at some point there’s no road left to run. I’m aware of the unpredictability of things and how no assumptions can be made about the number of remaining beats. The path may stretch on for longer than I’d really want, or it could abruptly end without warning. Given that fact and given that knowledge, why can’t I find a way to live?
What does it mean to be alive? It seems like an important question, the answers to which should shape our time and space. If living is more than breathing, what am I missing? Is living a synonym for loving? Then how can it be that I don’t love anything, I don’t love anyone? Is life beyond breath reserved for the most deserving? The most capable? The most human? Are some humans more human than others? And if you don’t love humans and if you don’t love yourself, does that mean you’re something else? A zombie, perhaps, or a body, at best?
I don’t know what it means to belong. I have loved, and I believe I have been loved in return, but if that was living, it was another life, lived by someone else. I was meant to learn and grow and build, brick after brick, rung after rung. Instead, some other me climbed while I ducked and bobbed about, intermittently taking breaths and taking in water. I don’t belong in water. It’s deep but there can be no ascent when your imperative is to remain afloat. How does one swim when there is no shore? No safe harbour to welcome you back, no space that looks like home.
Is home a place? Is home somewhere, or nowhere? Is it anywhere you’ll find a face with a smile and protection for your fragile soul? If that’s home, how can it be constructed? Can I buy a plot, securely positioned on high, dry land, and raise a flag to signal intent? Intent to lay foundations and put up sturdy walls of brick and stone? Intent to foster warmth and a sense of enduring calm? Could that be a world within a world, a dimension so designed as to apply meaning to everything outside? A projection, an illumination, a vision of something worthy.
Worth being less aware of the minutes and the minutiae and the phases of the moon. The beats could beat and the seconds could tick, and the path could lead on over the horizon or it could return to weeds, and the meaning would remain in tact, bright and clear, above and below. In a dimension that can only be imagined, in some space parallel to here and now. It could be that life and love and meaning and home exist for some only as intangibles, inevitably and invariably remaining as abstract ideas that can never be realised. The nature of this very specific reality can then be nothing more than one of groundless hope, and of grinding endurance.
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