I fear the more I write,
the more I obscure what it is I really want to say,
that millions of pages, a whole canon
of human communication,
attempts to fill a void that is merely a page or two wide:
How improbable and tenuous our hold on existence.
How marvelous it is to wake up to a day full of rain,
or one blessed with sunshine.
Their infinite wonders, their unfeasible workings,
are equal in scope and awe.
And how terrifying that we spend a lifetime
loving other finite, decaying creatures,
sometimes for years, sometimes for mere minutes,
throwing ourselves into them in hopes of permanence,
knowing full well if we stop and think honestly
that in one fluttering instant our whole
incomprehensible collection of days
will fall into the unending stream of our universe,
stretching equally ahead and behind, eternally blind.
We are here but by chance.
Had one fraction of some elemental concoction
been altered, perhaps by the gravitational push
of a rock no bigger than my thumb,
making our once gaseous space a sliver more
oxygenized, this vast globe we call home
would be an untenable vat of magma.
Even all of this is too loquacious.
We are here, and then we are not.
We will love and everything we love
will shift and change and eventually descend
into a state of non existence, just like us.
The universe will expand, and it will not stop.
Our life has no permanent foothold.
Time is like a sheer cliff, holding nothing
but touching everything.
These words, this ability to invent
a state of being, a contextualized, reflective space,
is a miracle we cannot begin to fathom.
And these words, like every word ever written,
every thought ever conceived, every breath ever exhaled,
every kiss ever lingered over, will become intangible
the nanosecond they end, and it will be as if
nothing ever happened at all.
Still, I am rambling. One more try at brevity:
We are finite beings
searching for meaning in an infinite space.