Sunday, July 11, 2021

Set

How life is a constant rush of waves to shore, a series of forceful tumbles into grating ocean floors and relentless, desperate kicks up to the top of a crest, never fully reaching any goal before being mercilessly dragged back out by your own volition. How the drop is inevitable, how the involuntary determination to return to surface is consistent. I sat in a Williamsburg bar making jokes while my spine held its breath, how these moments of reprieve are short and incomplete. 

I return to the island limping, glimmers of hope quickly extinguished by this weight in my lungs. Ask the Universe for aid but all my asks are misguided: what I am looking for is not for the Universe to give. 

There is a moment in every hero's journey tale where our crusader meets the rocks at the bottom, is finally so defeated and broken that all hope seems lost. We expend our last breath waiting for the protagonist to find that little remaining spark within, that most human need to go on at every cost, to prove oneself to the mocking gods, we cheer when the spark is caught and propels this stand-in for our own struggles forward, upward, into blissful redemption and hard-earned triumph. This is the way we demand the story goes, this sates our agitation. But the story doesn't linger in the dark. 

Doesn't tell you how long you may need to endure the bottom,
how long you must hold your breath before you'll know how to get back to the top.

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