The Lightness

The world collapses upon itself and my mind wonders how it ever held up. I had sensed a change, a new scent to the otherwise stagnant air, but found only the shallow secrets of who I am. I wish I could say reality swept in quickly and painlessly, but I've walked this road before and know all too well how difficult it is. When the walls came down I had ignorantly and eagerly watched from the sidelines, celebrating the cracks in their otherwise solid foundation. But I found only what I placed inside... a sullen reminder of what this life has become. Perhaps that is all it ever was.

I made a mistake. Days after illustrating the painful toxicity of hope, I went against my own intuition and swallowed it vigorously. Hope is addictive. Hope turns a meaningless conversation into the seed of a flowering miracle. It mutilates a casual smile into something solid and concrete, building faith upon false pillars of trust. And after the collapse, when the floating debris of your dreams have settled, you reflect on your mistakes as if it were some other foolish person who had been deceived. I sat three feet from everything I've ever wanted... I could have reached out and touched it in desperation. In reality, what seemed so close may have very well been a thousand miles away, out amongst the stars in the night sky. They had aligned so perfectly. Hope convinced me maybe I had as well.

The world is a lonely place when hope fails. The most casual of acquaintances serve only to remind one of the disparity between two persons. Where you might have before returned a smile, it becomes an impossibly difficult act to feign. The skies blacken and swoon in even in the brightest hours of the day, casting a shadow everywhere your eyes pursue to avoid it. It is the coldest shadow I've known, but it is one that the sun will eventually purge. When the world collapses it requires a short while to recover. At least. And though you may eventually build the walls back up, hiding your secrets behind painted lies, there are always cracks and holes to remind us what lay inside. There are always the silent whispers of logic seeping from our wounds, reminding us the risk we take with hope.

It is a cycle. How many times have I built these walls? How many times have I covered my scars with fantasies? I've walked this path so many times that I know it by the heart it has broken so freely. The cycle repeats and all I see are the same mistakes I make over and over... the same boulder I've been pushing all my life. I question existence, hope, love, hate, and everything in between. And In the very moment that I decide escape is the only true solution, the winds of change slap me forcibly upon the cheek. I have walked this road a hundred times and suddenly I find myself in front of a fork I've never known before. The world explodes.

The lightness fills my veins and suddenly I breath air through new lungs. Shadows resist and falter against a bubbling smile beats me so brutally that I am left in genuine bewilderment. Tears stream from my cheeks and I realize something so chokingly profound that I cannot breath... I am alive. For the first time in what seems like an eternity I'm watching the world through my own beating heart. It is magical and wonderful and everything my dreams have promised it to be. But it is fleeting. In an instant it leaves me broken on the floor, twisting my mind in a thousand directions at once. I don't understand any of it. I don't care.

I call it the lightness. It is a transient sensation that takes hold of me when I am least expecting it. I do not know, unfortunately, what incites its effects or what prevents its permanency. I do know that I have felt its grasp at least three different times during the last two weeks, each time presenting with different but similar symptoms. To put its effects into words is difficult. I can only describe it as a concentrated euphoria, a natural high that drags me from this weary shadow and opens my eyes. For a moment I feel truly wonderful, and then it is gone. I regress to the shadows and the walls are resurrected from the rubble.

But something has changed hasn't it? There are new stars in the sky and perhaps it is they who can finally lead me from this place. Are they are the key to ascension? Though I cannot cannot know for sure, I find myself looking to the future in desperate anticipation. The winds smell of change... the stars show new constellations... and all of a sudden the addiction begins anew.