Life Between the Crosshairs

I stood today, two feet planted firmly on the slippery ground. It seems a metaphor for the changing world I live in, feeling what is beneath you is somehow solid, will hold you up even when the wind blows your hair in your eyes and slaps your cheeks. But it doesn’t.

Below my feet is a nation wide sheet of ice, masked by the crisp snow that crunches under the set of footprints I leave behind, lurking. It is black and it is sheer and it is always unyeilding. It confuses my toes, toes that want to press their weight into security but find only give. And when it gives, and my feet come out from underneath me - I reach out for that which propped me up. It’s gone.

I look back at those prints, tracks I’ve left in my wake as I push relentlessly forward, and I see destruction. I see the refuse of all I’ve touched in my struggle into the real and I’m filled with regret. I wanted to turn left instead of right and just walk, plodding away from all that is too much real for me, pain and hurt and disappointment, bitterness that took root in the place love should have been, and rotted.

Yesterday, I fell flat on my back and I lay there akimbo. I lay there waiting to catch my breath again. The world crushed my chest and the breath pushed out of my lungs and tears gathered in my eyes. And I looked for someone to pull me up. To fill me with oxygen and make the stars disappear from the edges of my vision. All I heard was the wind.

I’m still waiting.

Alone on a train aimless in wonder
An outdated map crumbled in my pocket
But I didn’t care where I was going
‘Cause they’re all different names for the same place.

The coast disappeared when the sea drowned the sun
And I knew no words to share with anyone
The boundaries of language I quietly cursed
And all the different names for the same thing.

-Death Cab for Cutie

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