It's hot. Inescapably so, the type that leaves foot-prints of warm clammy skin across your body. The back drips, the legs wobble and chafe. You feel it imprinting it's impetuous sense of rightousness upon you as soon as you deliver yourself out of the comfort of your air-conditioned space and into the mid-day air.
It doesn't create fearful panic, like the cold can, but a slow and frustrating boiling alive, an inescapable truth – nature will always win.
No matter how many 'truths' you can discover in life this living thing remains strange and difficult sometimes. So many moments seem to bring clarity and strength, but they walk in-hand with the endless questioning of our ability to do the best for ourselves. What is it that we really want? What is it that we desire and what is it that will make us happy, truly happy? These days come on like a migraine tinted with fear; the fear of failure, the fear of pain, the fear of loosing things you will regret and can't get back. Ultimately, fearful of ourselves and letting ourselves down by not achieving greatness, not achieving basic elemental moments of truth, reality and health. I know we are all wanderers by our own measure in a vast and seemingly endless sea of possibilities, outcomes, decisions and consequences, each no more dramatic, real, or important then the last. So how do you do it? How do you find levity amidst the crashing waves? A simple dismissal? A greater quest? Sometimes it feels that even the deepest parts of what we think we know are still just passing fancy. On some level everything is negotiable, everything is up for debate and open to change.
Except that one damn thing that never leaves. That biting polyp that presses itself inside you. Inescapable is the desire for more, for every experience that is possible. Having an open heart is to see yourself simultaneously in multiple universes, each one calling you with its own special promises of happiness and fulfilment. Standing on that cliff, head hanging over, hands firmly grasped to either side, not wanting to fall over yet not wanting to stop fantasizing about your own fatalistic plunge into the swaying trees below. You can be anything and everything, but our human minds, our sense of selfhood asks us to be one at a time. The problem is that the freedom we seek cannot be harnessed between them, it has to run between all possibilities, all outcomes. It has to see you belong everywhere, while the heart goes on knowing it belongs nowhere except inside your chest, fuelling your next steps into the unknown. Another cliff to ponder, another road to walk, another life to lead, all as seemingly meaningless and magical as the last. Here in this simple place I may have found a soft repose, the release and forgiveness I needed so desperately, but I have also found the relentless side of an identity that questions everything and will, not, stop. Tear my heart out for the ones I could spend the rest of time with and leave them that piece of me they will always own. Leave these fallen tears and spilled blood on the sidewalks I've grown to love and maybe, one day, I'll follow it back home again; my morbid and broken Hansel and Gretel trail of lost memories and lives I've left behind. Or maybe the rains of time will fall and wash it all away, lost to the passage of years I can't spend, split in pieces.
All the inspiration in the world, all the hope for the future doesn't make it any easier to loose the things you love, so for now this love becomes the new string I tie to the few remaining spaces of emptiness I have left. This time becomes coloured and sprinkled with the glitter and gold of nostalgia, a longing for a time I still inhabit, but am no longer allowed to own.
