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When you look back and realize, your empire is a mirage, a figment of someone else’s imagination; nothing more than toothpicks and playing cards, stacked to Heaven like Babylon….
Once upon a time, you thought you were alive. Somebody gave you the wrong glasses and you thought the cards were bricks and the toothpicks were little pieces of love-like glue to hold it all together.
What will you do when you look back and see right through it? That fortress you thought was impenetrable…. That devastating loneliness, catastrophic emptiness… it releases and you drop like a stone, free falling, grasping for something.
Anything.
Wind, drawing through your fingertips like the invisible passing of time, those things you let slip by you that were real, while you played with apparitions.
Your renditions of the truth look convincing, but not enough to shine a light through the growing darkness.
What will you do when you take a step back and see everything as it is for the first time?
What will you do?
How will you go about your life when you realize you haven’t even been living it?
You have let those around you die inside your mind, withering away their flowers for lack of water, lack of love… lack of you. Will you blame? Will you fondle the stages of grief like waking in a stranger’s bed, unsure what happened the night before? Will you run screaming into the streets? Will you lie there and weep, begging the lie to come back and hold you tight?
How will you survive? When everything you built your life on crumbles like sleep when you open your eyes?
Will you know you’ve opened your eyes for the first time? Will you stay outside? Or will you dive into the first blind spot you find, welcoming the vacancy, the blackness, the nothingness once again…?
What will you do?
I hope you will stay.
It’s hard at first—the light can be blinding—but it gets easier. Your eyes adjust and your skin thickens and one day, you’ll look back and wonder how on Earth you slept for so long. You’ll be happy that ignorance died. You’ll throw away your umbrella and shades and bathe in the sunshine.
No longer afraid to stare into the sun.
