The Brightening Bleakness

Here I sit, my throat tightens around a feeling of remorse for nothing in particular. I know this pressure will yield to something new and so I wait, not patiently mind you, but I wait. I reach for whatever might tend the garden of my dreams, but nothing seems to offer sustenance, only a sense of futility, more density to make heavier the desperate weight inside of me.

I breath in the crispness on the air and I feel the sweetness that is just around the corner. "No, not there. Stay here." I remind myself, but I cannot help the wanting to leave this stagnant pool of my own lack of inspiration. I could turn to memory, but how do I not? How do I turn in to meet the bleak offering that life has made just for me? Could this be a resting place? If only I had been so fervently and passionately involved before it was here. I have too much time on my hands at present.

Now is the time to learn to find the entry point. Here is the place where I am invited to begin. I know there is something in this for me. It keeps coming back. I know how to spread my wings and fly into the joy of a well lit sky. I even enjoy falling backward into the deep darkness. How do I make my peace with the gray nothingness, the waiting place, the unspectacular mediocrity in myself? The lack of peace or passion represents a dullness of mind, of spirit. Is this the middle ground?

I open my mouth to no one at all. I am listless. Give me more of this, the cardboard flavor of life without meaning. Stuff me until I invert or revert to my original state of reverie. Or is this the most common experience, just sitting, trying to receive something from what feels empty, nil, indeterminate?

I heard there was a way to say yes to everything. So, I try. I expect something will happen but this is really just wishing this nothingness away, entering in to move through. I remember that boredom is my least favorite desert. Why is there so damned much of it? Oh, I remember it is because my life isn't hard enough to grant me no respite. That life would surely transcend this feeling, or would it? And why would I ask such a thing anyway? Have I not learned not to tempt fate this way?

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The gray cover settled over the land, insidiously shrouding every corner of life in its lackluster haze. My brain was a dull ache of wretchedness. The taste in my mouth stale, like old grains. Nothing too dangerous or too exciting ever happened here. So we turned toward the box to view someone else's story. Even the box itself was gray, but the colors passed over it, through it and entered into the field of our perception.

We were neither young nor old. I couldn't bring myself to dye my white hair. It felt like a badge of passing and surpassing time. I wanted it to tell you that I had worth beyond your years. You looked on and saw it as the laziness of neglect. Well, I would not yield and you would not open to my vantage points. We were quite the pair of old contenders fighting with the very fabric of the life that surrounded us.

My heart gave way long before yours. I had to know what they were planning, had to ask for more information. You were always so stolid, sober and contained. Well, let's just say that I was not. I always ended our silences first and rarely managed to pause before bursting out my own ideas. I don't know how you listened to me all the many times that I railed at you for everything and nothing at all.

My complaints seem so trivial now. If only I had really understood how little time we had to live our lives. Well, you know what they say. "Hindsight is twenty twenty."