Red

I now find it odd, even if once I found it quite normal.

The world was once bland, a palette of 50 shades of black coupled with 50 shades of white giving birth to 50 shades of grey. There, I lived my life, never quite realizing the blandness of it all, never understanding the beauty of what could be, until one day it happened.

I awoke in red.

Awash with the agony of loss, wretched in the twisted pain of waking from that dream, I awoke in red. Arms once full with silly idols worshiped in silly rituals were suddenly left in pieces at my feet, gone with the notion that I was certainly born a slave to them. A mind once full of fear and stories of woe was suddenly steeled to its journey. I grabbed my brush and embarked on the holiest of missions.

To paint my world in red.

I used the rope chosen to end it all to tie myself to that rising, red star. I felt the heat of raw love course through me, exposing me to the eternal bliss of pure passion, of unwavering forgiveness, of unbridled  dreams limited only by my own reluctance to realize them.

“Be brave, my love, and see the world through new eyes.”

Courage, my friend, was always there. It simply needed to be liberated. Courage is like a lion who, when set free, suddenly becomes too big for any cage. It can’t be tricked into believing again that any imprisonment is safe. Instead, it sees the world as its own, and it becomes the master of every space it decides to call its home.

When it roars, the fearful shudder. When it calls, the timid run and hide. The darkest spaces become its prey, and it eats with reckless abandon. There are no corners in which to hide because there is no box to bring it peace. It simply blesses itself in the harmony of love, and in the light birthed the moment it decided to be born.

The blackness becomes afraid as the slowest strides to destiny become the fullest gait. I enjoy each footfall, each imprint left on the dusty trail, as I gleefully stain the world around me in joyful splashes of red. When the ghostly bells of memory infringe upon my dance I beat them back with the endless sound of laughter. When the pretentious stares of judgment come bearing down on me, I knock them down with an unwavering glare of a soul now found. When the beast bears its ugly teeth, I simply smile, and love it, and let it do its thing.

When times get tough, as they often will in the dream-induced nightmares of our humanity, I simply sit and remember the moments when it all seemed so easy, when it all was so fucking grey. I remember being a slave to a system I was born into, a prisoner of my own resolve and a pack mule to my own desire to achieve a dream thrust at me by others. I remember the grey despair and then that little dash of red that exploded into another way of being.

So I honor the grey with the red, and the red with the grey. I honor the joy with the memories of dismay, and the sadness with countless smiles and the anger with an eternal embrace. I honor the fear with courage, and the courage with an unwavering march onward even when my knees begin to buckle.

There it is. A world awash in red. A world whose beauty is measured by its whole, by its tribulations and its victories. A world were losses are wins and wins are special only in their experience. A world were peace reigns in the holy design that suggests everything is love.

I will live my remaining days as me in that world, in that universe. My lover, laid out upon her altar, adorned in the red vestiges of a life reborn, of a soul completely ready for the dive outside the known, answers my joyful call to leap. I greet her there, forever rising and falling to the unknown mastery of the Knowing Wind, leaving little bits of crimson beads of sweat pooling upon the arid ground.

To there I go. Follow me at the risk of dying to be reborn, of living to see the truth, of seeking to never look again.