What I’d Like to Say (Is That I’m Not Sure What to Say)

There are no words to be wasted, so I will not waste any with pleasantries. I think you might already know the things I am going to tell you, but we are a forgetful breed, and certain things must be repeated often enough that they may seep below the skin and stick to the tendons in the same way salt sticks to the sea.

I do not claim solution with these words. I am simply pushing them out into open space the way a boat drifts out to catch the growing currents and doesn’t know if it will return until it has. Sometimes the wind howls too loudly and nothing can be heard or seen past the roaring water. Sometimes fish soar overhead and land, flopping and alive, against the rough deck. I only know that what I say has a harbor to return to inside my heart if it can make it there, and I hope that you might open your own, too. I hope you might turn on the beacons that rest atop your lighthouses and search for wisdom inside the dark.

I will start and end only with my own thoughts, for these are all I have to give:

I think life is figuring out what you’re going to give to it. Even the smallest gust of wind aids the coming storm, so you must decide which direction to blow and you must do so with great vigor and great urgency, for your tomorrows are as lucky and as fleeting as the long-dead stars that bore you. It’s easy to forget our power, the aching and raging thing that is pulled from deep inside the earth and pushes against our open palms like a spark waiting to catch. Let it catch. Burn it down and build it all up again. Just because we can’t see the cages we are born in doesn’t mean they do not exist. You must travel far enough to reach the bars, and then to split them apart like a butterfly only just realizing it is no longer a caterpillar. Unfurl your wings, my brothers and sisters, even if they sometimes feel too heavy to lift.

I think life is accepting that you are always lost. Even the sharp lines of an artist’s brush must swoop and swirl to make the picture bleed together, so you must allow the questions of your heart to guide but never dissuade you from taking another step, even if you are unsure of the soil beneath your feet. It’s easy to stand still, to watch the passing ticks of the clock with frozen indifference and to one day awaken to a body made of old skin and a mind of blank and glaring walls, never filled. Fear is a sinking stone and so you must be the ripple that surrounds it, pushing outward into the great and wild beyond. For it is those who are lost can find the hidden things that shimmer just out of sight.

I think life is shared, no matter how we hide. Even shadows find a partner in the dancing candlelight, so you must let the souls around you be the wisps of hope you cling to, and let their crashing laughter fill your heart and push you steadily into daylight, out into the terrifying open. It’s easy to remain unknown, to huddle against the blunt edges of your existence and wonder at your lasting loneliness, at the wavering glances from those you were meant to love. Sometimes it may seem that the only thing more terrifying than being forgotten is being remembered, but in the remembering there is love, and this is life’s most precious and sacred thing, for love is the instrument and we are the music created.

I think that surely, I know nothing. I speak because you have given me the chance to do so, but my words are only as sure as the bells that toll simply because the breeze permits their movement. I wish to tell you of the things I have learned, but I do not know how far they echo. I wish to reach you and pull you from the crumbling walls of a world that seems beyond our help sometimes, a place so fraught with ugliness that we may well forget to see its beauty. I fear my words are wasted even as I speak them, that there is nothing I could say that will change the way we are now, for we are slow in our transforming and hesitant in our alterations. And yet I have still spoken, and perhaps this is the difference.

We take stuttering steps over concrete roads that will one day crack apart and be consumed by a slow and steady growing of green. We rest our heads on the memories of another, buried time even as the dirt shifts and swallows where we are now. The forgetting is how the sun sets and fails to rise come morning, and so we must not forget. We must live for the days we still have and for each other. We must cling to ourselves and to the world and to the people we love and to the strangers we pass on the street, for each of us is a small and invisible shifting of air that ripples past with barely a whisper. But together? Together, we are a storm.

I think what I am trying to say, with the few words still left to me, is that nothing stays. Nothing stays, and this is as it should be, for real and tangible beauty can only be found in a thing fragile enough to be destroyed. It is in its mortality that it is remembered in the same way it is the ashes that give story to the fire that burned. I am grateful to have burned brightly beside all of you, to have done what we could with the time and the words and the place that we have found ourselves. We are linked, you and I, and we have much left to do.

So I will end here, before all my words are used up. This way, there will always be more to say. This way, maybe someone else can come to fill in the blanks. Because we need each other to finish the things we start. We need each other to remember the power of the storm that sits inside us all.

Without rain, nothing grows.