Life as we know it

Some evenings when the sky turns golden and the clouds begin to lift, you can feel a strange sense of uncertainty as the day peels away and the sky is revealed to be a starry, cosmic emptiness, and you can feel the way the bits of the world are clinging together for dear life, for a sense of validation under the vaulted heavens. You can feel the way stuff swirls around in the air, undetermined, like the dust in the cosmos that isn't yet a comet or a planet or a star, and you begin to think about the way people lean on each other like a vast perfect circle of dominoes, each bearing the weight of the whole human world, a burden of entirety and of infinity. You think about how we place our woes on each other's backs and watch the generations topple with a rattle, and how anguish has been perfectly balanced in a world where we accept one another's grief so they may suffer our own. For in an unblemished world we would have no need for companionship, nor to lift each other from the dirt; life would not be as we know it.

Choosing directions

Sometimes you sit back with a heart full of expectation and you wait, and life with all its colour and sound and bright lights whizzes by and surrounds you with a million thrilling opportunities and glorious promises, and you simply sit back in the knowledge that when the time comes, the right current will release you from your moorings and sweep you into an ocean where you can part the waters and walk on the waves, where every footfall wells up with a little shimmering pool of your destiny. And on that ocean there will be nothing on the horizon but clouds shaped in every form of your fancy.

Sometimes the current doesn't come and you continue waiting for the waves even as the sky grows dark, feeling the tug of the water on your hands, on your feet, refusing to yield to what is not irresistible and inexorable. Sometimes we forget that we must immerse ourselves in the water and choose a direction in the dimensionless deep before the current can find a hold, before life will take an interest.