"The point of no return"

Same Walk, Different Shoes

Space-time

At break of dawn, traces of tiny glowing specks haloed us for so ever, like stardust trapped in the first rays of light, only visible after we’ve wiped our eyes. In awakening, all purely paused, free to wander, like the dust, blanching the eyes in wonder and whereabout. The light laid us bare, bringing matter to the surface, bones and kin.

Then the dimming began. Come in, the silent clips of you veering out of your mind. There you were again mixing your particles within mine, your presence so tidal to free will.

My childhood felt like a blur. If you squinted, light forms became forward fleeting and inconsequential. I was never in the moment and always in my head, often trapped in daydreams and unable to leave. That made it hard to remember what really occurred around me.

Last I remember you went missing, we had searched for you all over your village. The owner of a café saw you astray, circling around your post box. What held you then? Light?

Everything suspended in it, even time. Glowing for those who could see.

How could we judge your mania when all our scholarly references couldn’t cross the unobservable universe? In such, nothing was within the ordinary.

Some looked to float on the harmony of risk and rewards, while others sought to escape. We distanced ourselves and moved on to fade you out.

This distorted relativity, the bending of the light, the ever slowing of time, the intangible you, in mind and soul, scorned by blood, which must have defied not just you, but gravity itself to enter up into my heart and push on onwards into the little one I hold so freely thereafter.

There you flow now between the vast nothing and my everything, suspended in space-time.

***

Redshift

Us ordinaries didn’t recognize you anymore. You reached the deep edge, giving up on structure and stuff, beyond where I could imagine anything remained visible and akin. All that was left of you was found stretched out, with jeans on inside out, unconscious, to the point of no return.

I struggled that day, that I didn’t find you sooner. Would things have been different were I there with you?

You were bound to change in me.

***

Newton’s 1st law of motion

You passed quickly, months thereafter. Faster than the doctors had foreseen. What could I hold onto now? These ons and ons? When time could bend itself from years to months.

Maybe I ground myself. Though, what footing did I have, if the earth below me hurtles across the solar system at a hundred thousand kilometers per hour? What happens to the commotion of growing up fleeing you after it stops?

Life had to make more sense now that you’ve riddled it less. You couldn’t just cease to exist. I saw you, like me one day, traveling through space, waiting to be absorbed by another, or else, be there to warm the stillness.

You had receded into the gallows of my subconscious, my inner prism of pining thoughts, joining them in refracting strands of sacred conversations into the ethereal.

The outer world went on and on, planning their futures as if they were fated with long lives. While I feared time. My heart raced when people suggested there was always another time. I had to hold in ‘you could be dead by then’.

Was it wrong to feel nothing but death itself? All which had run through my soul started settling into the ebbs and flows of this life sans you.

Was such dark peace? That simple unbridled state to wholly live undisturbed by the disturbed? It did feel free, the past hurtling far, far away.

But this calm, will it leave as suddenly as you?

***

Quantum entanglement

My existence simultaneously was at rest and in flux. Was I happy before there was a before or probabilistically after the after? So much of me was frozen in dual states. I navigated being whole yet fractured, a transient in the ethereal, yet mercurially bound by your every whim postmortem.

I was here with gravity. I was here to defy what was made of me. And yet triggered by your capricious antimatter.

May simpler truths wash over me. Or if not, let there be time blankets to compress my weary past and aging bones into an infinitesimal point of nothingness, where none shall ever escape again and where you, too, no longer to wreak havoc. Let us wither away inside its calm collapse of the so and so’s.

There must have been a way to escape this. Nor dharma nor high priest of the vanguards could have unraveled this, except maybe the severing of pain itself from definition.

***

Occam's razor

Nature always found a way, in it. I walked with the trees on and off of me. As light threaded through its limbs and imperfections. Just stepping foot in its habitat, I was disturbing it so. And yet it said nothing back to me. I looked down at the new thing I just made, who looked upon the world with complete wonder in harmony with the many unknowns. Why did I disturb it so by forcing a knowing? Was this at its very root what I had been letting go of? Did the trees gently force their intelligence onto the creatures below? Did such a disturbance need to respect the cosmic order of things? Or do I just let go of intention of controlling the guiding? Do I leave my little one, to find the way, in it? To become as entangled as I?

I wandered around the same daily routines with a quiet contract to get distracted by the ready-made mundane. I looked at us in the eyes. I delivered thanks and kind intentions. I got angry before I wrote. I cancelled on things to cry in the dark. And the light showed me the lessons that would awaken the deeper ones.

It might have been my age of understanding or society that raised me virtually to get lost in its echo chamber, constantly looking for signs of validation of my very being. What a crazy new era, fighting nature’s contradictions from eliminating us. Did it matter what was said in a mirror?

The golden hour came, and all was quiet in the part of the world bombs weren’t going off. I was holding a tea kettle in one hand and my kid in the other, wondering when we would sleep tonight. And this was love. This was where I’ve always wanted to be. A forest of moments that spanned and spanned before there was and thereafter.

The greenery will change, will die, and fall away, become food for the forest bed. The ecosystem will revise what it has done a billion times over to keep the exchange. And ultimately resign me in my place.

***

Observer Effect

I once read that you could live for eternity in the hearts of others. Yet rarely did I hear how I was in those hearts. I heard my mother instead, as I tinkered on mine. I didn’t have a sense that I’d ever put this to rest, yet I didn’t revolt anymore. Could that have been remedied before her passing?

Did it take a catastrophic collapse of a massive star, that unleashed a blinding flash of such immense force, sending shockwaves across the interstellar void, to finally set us free?

I’d often wake in the night from dreams of you leaving again, distressed of not fully knowing. I’d quietly creep out of my bed, over to my bedroom window, and look at the specks of stars flickering in the black sky.

There, somewhere out there. Floating in all that dust. Always glowing. Yet to be something or maybe nothing at all.

Wipe your eyes. Find me.

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“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us. Read Vol 1 collection of writers

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