Sometimes you have to take risks, hang from a skyscraper by your toes, run at a lover full speed, because tomorrow no longer matters. You’re always looking for the purple in the sky, the blue in the grass, the black in the sea. You never want to be the one who even thinks I should have learned to fly, reached a little higher, let alone believes it. You never want to be the one sitting at home, blowing rings of smoke across the balcony and sipping a glass of stale white wine.
But the nights don’t always go as planned, because no matter how fearless you are, often you are still lonely. You wake up beside an unknown lover, a lover who doesn’t know what it’s like to hand-feed a tiger, a lover who’s only knowledge of you is of a different source, more intimate and less personal, and you wonder what would have been different had you stayed behind the veil. What would have been different if you had lived your life according to the master plan set for you, what would happen if you hadn’t learned to dance like the sea, fall like a bird, sing like a star.
When doubt crawls over you, you have the insatiable urge to disprove it. To stare at the sun, befriend the enemy, walk into danger’s mouth short an angel, mix truth with lies until you create a world. You always know that if you mess up you’ll pay with your own blood, but that’s been a given since the beginning. A debt you settle with a knife, because then you can go on, run for the next cliff and hope that the music catches you.
Then the tears come, often unbidden, swallow you, swirl around the colors until you’re dizzy, until they’ve extinguished the light in the palm of your hand. The tears enslave you, hold you against yourself, take the known and plunge it into a darkness so deep it can only become unknown. Sometimes the darkness grows and swallows you too, leaving you searching for a flame to guide you back towards reality.
But curiosity and reality often give different answers, picking you up and throwing you towards failure like the wind throws a child’s doll, left carelessly in the sun after a butterfly flew by, changing the world just enough to change the child’s dreams. Curiosity is never satisfied with reality, because reality rarely provides something to hold and nurture, instead giving strange equations that are somehow expected to encompass the meaning of the universe.
You have to remember. You have to remember how it felt to have your back pressed against concrete, savagely imprisoned until you couldn’t breathe, the stars just visible. You have to remember the nights spent curled up in a sweatshirt three times your size, wondering if it could work like a magician's cloth, and make you disappear altogether. You have to remember the exhilaration of the chase, the thrill of the risk, the joy of the knowledge that can only come from experience. You have to remember the tender moments, the moments when your body met a lover, and sparks flew from your eyes into deep pools of light.
So you run at heartbreak, embrace absurdity, challenge the world just for the sake of a challenge. You set fires, let the crackle and the flame free you, create you, teach you how to be both yielding and fierce. You burn what they left you, before they went to hold someone easy, someone who wouldn’t stare them in the depths of their eyes, someone who wasn’t fearless.
