Thursday's Child

Some journeys have no beginning, some have no end. The only thing that matters, really, is the journey itself and, while some are an adventure, others are more like a sentence. Endlessly plodding from one day to the next, one foot in front of the other, in an object lesson in entropy. Every journey begins in the high and the beautiful, full of hope, and passes through suffering and tragedy, to end in the darkness that consumes everything.

So far to go, but the only progress is the marking of time as the rest of the world seems to slip by in slow motion, forever just beyond your outstretched, grasping fingers. The reflection stares back at you from the mirror, the lines unnoticed as the gathering years etch them into your face, and the man trapped in the glass doesn't like what he sees. Memories gather in the gloom, silently, a parade of the unfulfilled, the lost and the mourned, on a journey of their own. In the cold, bitter hours of the night they confront you, accuse you, call to you like sirens, beckoning you seductively to dash yourself on the rocks. Exquisite emptiness, like diamonds on glass they hold out promises that can be nothing but broken, leaving behind cuts so fine the pain doesn't even register any more. All that is left is the horrible knowledge that the guardian is not allowed to possess that which he guards.

Caught in amber, with nowhere to go and no way to get there. You can lie to your family, you can lie to your friends, to strangers, but you can't lie to yourself. Like layers of scar tissue the lies build up, year after year, false images of piety and worth, and no matter how much distance you put between yourself and the events that shattered your soul, the lies only bring you right back to where you started from. Bearing the weight of the world on your shoulders, would it be so hard to just let it all slip away, like grains of sand running their inevitable course? Even Atlas shrugged.

Step by agonizing step, a terrible ennui with no beginning and no end, just an interminable stretching that blinds you to where your responsibilities end and acts of God begin. A terrible guilt stalks your fevered dreams, mocks you, taunts you with a mortality you can't accept and can't deny. You couldn't save the ones you loved, you can't even save yourself, and what could possibly matter beyond that? There is nowhere to go but to go, and God isn't listening as he dices with the cosmos.

So far to go, and never an end until it ends, a star fading in the darkness, a whispered memory until the memory itself falls silent, consumed in the night, a lost child wailing for the comfort of its mother's arms. No Heaven and no Hell, no gods or demons except those that we make, the bits of regret and loss that pursue you like the ancient Furies and that are just as relentless, just as implacable. Just to fade, unremembered and unmourned, a final end to a journey from nowhere to nowhere.