Meeting Murphy

We sit here waiting for absolution, or something absolute, at least. Our chairs are tipped forward off the edge of the cliff; remember when our mothers would always tell us not to learn forward so much, don’t you know that yet, that one day our chairs would tip, and then, then you’d learn your lesson.

Now our grown up egos are disillusioned and bruised, fallen victim to Murphy and his law. We are asking, what did we do, instead of what could we have done. My little sister asked, “If you had a time machine, would you go into the past or future?” And there was no hesitation. Regrets, they rest, and stay, and take a stronghold.

There are people I see in the 20s who look like and live like they are in their 40s, and I wonder what their mistakes were, before their candles blew out and the wax melted a river. No one grows up and says, today I’ll sit on the crackling cobble with my broken strings and my lonely voice, and I’ll have made it in this world. Nobody wakes up and says, today I’ll ring up a thousand orders for hours on end, and it’ll be everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Maybe they were victims, too, and only this time, Murphy wanted to use them to show the world not to mess with him again. 

But look for the girl with ink smudges on her hands. She wakes up every morning and dresses herself in a cloak, no matter the fashion du jour. It is her blanket, and with it, she chases storms from her window because that’s as far as she can go, as close as she can get. It is a suffocating blanket of heavy words, but if there were nothing to hold her down, the wind might blow her right out of the blue of the sky.

We forget, I think, what it feels like to be free. We dive into the depths of our sadness, but our tanks are stones, the weights on our souls. Or maybe, maybe we never felt it because we never leaned far enough to free fall, to trust in wind despite the gravity of the situation. We forgot what it feels like until the first scent of laundry on a warm spring day, or the cold drop of rain against constant blankets of lightning. We forget that there is such thing as resilience, that we have the ability to find light in darkness. But we forget that there is a difference between sacrifice and avoidance: I have forgotten the people there during what I considered the best few moments of my life. I wish it they were with others.

There are contradictions when we deem best or worst, and there is no creating of experiences that can ever best a best, but Murphy, he will make it so easy to worsen a worst. 

So this is a fight.

Nobody gave us an armor. We only know to put the pressure where it hurts, and we know exactly how it feels to hurt, and in that one moment, we lose all humanity and we hurt back, just to share the feeling of being hurt to rid it of itself and to find our humanity again. Nobody said it was easy, but who even has the right to deem it so. This, this is a fight with words and heartbeats. We cannot fall, except to ourselves.