Heavier than Hope

You can see the sun’s rays much clearly because they fought their way out of the clouds. If this is what greets you after a day’s work, life isn’t so bad, is it?

The horizon is as distant as when the world began, or you think so. But today, you can see it. Today, anything seems possible.

How many times have you watched the sun kiss it? Enough to recognize the kind of longing that follows it. Life is impossibly large and you are so damned small, so far from it that you just ache.

At this distance, with the day almost gone, you are at the edge of tomorrow you just have to sleep, there is hope after all. Though, whoever believes in hope anymore? It is light as a feather, no weight on reality. It lifts you up a few inches and drops you down the next day.

Yet you cling to it. You imagine all sorts of possibilities. Endlessly. Tirelessly. They say only a fool would try the same thing twice expecting a different result.

Now you stand at the same place where only a few weeks ago, possibilities rushed at you, out of anxious nights, awakened by the morning light.

And you stood there to take it. It filled you with something heavier than hope. Somehow more substantial because you didn’t have to force it to being. You couldn’t take flight but you would much prefer to be rooted.

Here, at the summit of an unscalable mountain. Here, at the edge of a cliff beyond which is unknown. Or here, among your people.

You were a speck in the universe then, as you are now.

What is so sacred in the world that you can’t touch it? How fragile is life that you can’t change it? What does it matter in the end? We don’t know.

But for a brief moment, the sun’s rays fought their way out of the clouds, for you to see.