The sigh. The sigh that seems to involuntarily fall from your lips with the breath that once seemed trapped in your soul. It’s almost as if you can feel the tsunami of challenge building, and you feel as though you are standing alone facing the impending wall of water.
What once released you from bondage now feels like shackles pinning you to the wide open sands. The ocean builds its torrent before you, and though you stand in the open space there is nowhere that you can really go. You can move and bless yourself with the illusion of control, but the wave will still be before you. Its shadow will chase you from one jetty to the next, and you are no safer on one end of the beach than the other.
The sigh. That utterance of resignation signaling a surrender to a reality not entirely your own making. You have fallen in your weakness, leaving bits of your tired and worn flesh on the sand. You rise, the wave is still coming. You run some more, falling, bleeding, rising, still as unsafe as you were standing on the waterline. Perhaps now is a time to pray, as long as it doesn’t mean falling on your bloody knees again to do it.
Sometimes in our lives the wave is forgotten in a supposed distraction. The sun rises beautifully, the birds sing, a kiss sends shivers down your spine. You draw letters in the sand, write love notes through the ether to a soul that reminds you of higher ground. Smaller waves come and wash some of the letters away. Ink runs as the waves soak the parchment they were written on. Clouds hide the sun and oceans separate souls. The wave still remains.
I often wonder what the real distraction is. Is it the kiss or the wave? Is it the sunrise or the shadow of life’s tides cutting you off from the light? Is it the chains that I hear rattling as I run or the fact that I realize, somewhere, that I’m the one who put them on? Is it the way I feel when she holds me hand or the way I feel in her absence? Do they all lead to the very same thing?
The quandary of my existence seems to lay in the fact that in order for my heart to beat it must first stop. Little bits of me must die in order for me to live. I must climb in order to love the valley viewed below. I must face the wave if I am ever going to be free from the effect it has on my soul, my heart, and the way I walk the path to my own happiness.
For now I will wallow in the bit of uncertainty that is shaking my space. It seems that is all I can do in the moment. Pray I may, run I will, fight I must. It’s all I know to do.