I recognize that the channels of life narrow, at times, like all things do. I know that the ones my waters haven’t yet flown down will hurt, the sides are jagged and new and unpolished. I greet my sadness in these closed quarters like an old war buddy. “This again,” we’ll laugh to ourselves. Too often has my gloom been a better ally than those of the flesh.

I encounter the brevity of life as I battle with my momentary concerns. I stare it in its face and I know its truth, and the wound of the instant howls louder than this certainty. Because my human predisposition to dream often causes me more harm that the rock faces of life. This little hope I have for the pinnacle of all things cups hands over my eyes when it would be simpler to embrace the vast ordinariness that my days will primarily hold.

You will be indifferent towards me, and then the light will hit me where I glimmer. The way will fall to disrepair but the world will grow lush around it. Comfort will too easily yield to chaos and then the chaos grows bored of our saturnine ways. And the forfeiting of ones energy to this divine knowledge might save us yet from the grand suffering we amount to.

But I don’t see myself ever growing accustomed to mediocrity. I don’t strike myself as the kind of person that will ever trade big love for an incurious detachment. Perhaps I am fated to always be enchanted and melancholic. Me and sadness, trailed by the gleeful truth, nipping at our heels like catfish through the murky water.

You know that this next part must come from you. I am dangling precariously across the line to hold what you decline to acknowledge. But I am reaching the finality of this ability. Me, the tightrope walking heartsick fool, blowing on my love in the blinding snow. Kept against my chest from an unrelenting wind we both know I’ll fold to. I am dangerously close to laying down, here in this cavern, to listen for an echo of your searching words. This next part must come from you.