Hope Springs Eternal

Have you ever felt all encompassing sorrow? Let it flow around you, into your bones, into your being, never let it leave your body? Not even let it fall out into tears – just held it inside, because sorrow is so painful. It is so precise. It is like ice held on your tongue. And clear – maybe clearer than any other feeling. It is poignant and crystal like. Other emotions are different. Happiness is foggy and warm. Love is confusing and exhausting and exciting for hours on end. Sorrow is like walking on a west coast beach in the middle of winter, while it rains. It won’t snow. The air is sharp around you, the rocks are slippery and wet, but you won’t fall. And the waves continue to crash at the shore – they will come up the beach, fill little divots of pebbles full of chilled salt water, so you can see green ferns wave at you… and the waves will flow out again. The wind will buffet your face, coldly, throwing rain at your body from every direction. And the beach will go on, and on, and on and on. And you will feel desolate. You will realize you are the only one. On that beach. On that ocean. Standing on that rock at that singular time. You will feel sorrow.

Is this what it is like to be alone? Is this why people fight to be together? Is this why we try to insulate ourselves with material items, and ideas of family, and notions of friends and community and partners and ‘lives’? Because being alone is so lonely? I want to see mussel shells in that weather. With the dark grey sky stretching beyond the beyond, turning everything into solitary objects, separating and preventing community. I want to revel and hold sorrow in my heart. It prevents happiness and renewed, inevitable pain from entering into it. Sorrow, is the loveliest kind of loneliness, if only for its poignant beauty.

How can one song, one person, one person make you feel this way? I guess, in reality, that person is myself. The object of affection does not ‘make’ you feel anything. Their action, or inaction induces a reaction. So in reality, it is only ourselves we can blame. I wish I could shut it off. I wish I could make it stop. I wish I could ……….. I wish I could not hear the same seven notes over and over and over in my head. I wish.

Hope springs eternal.