I’ve taken a long time to understand something staring at me for years. When the world ends, when the ground beneath your feet moves and slips away, when all you can do is grasp at straws as you fall down into a chasm, there is still tomorrow. There is always more. There is life after it all, and it waits for you patiently like a friend you are yet to meet. I’ve kept it waiting for so many years now. It’s only recently that I have dived headfirst into it all. There is life after all our regrets. It was always going to be this way.
We were all going to make our coffees and teas; we were all going to start our days, if not now, then eventually. It did not matter how sleepless the nights had been. The mornings arrived regardless. When all was said and done, there was still tomorrow, and we were in it before we realised it. A wave of novelty crashed without announcement. There was no alarm. Before we knew it, the new was here. It was okay not to like all of it, of course, but surely, even in the worst things that could happen to us, there was a piece of gold lodged in there somewhere.
When you walk on a street, and you see something worthwhile, and you have an epiphany, something you carry with yourself forever, like a chance encounter with no one in particular, that was how it changed for me. I found myself in a different place in the same city I have spent most of my life escaping from—not that I don’t intend to leave eventually, but something in the air tells me my life is here for now. When I do, I won’t be running. The places I’ve been stuck in for years don’t exist anymore—one is now a bank, another an empty lot, and I’ve lost track of so many others. The city has gone forward. I have started forgetting, too.
In this little pocket of newness—new people, new places, new vocations—the storms inside me have all but calmed down. I’m trying to build it all better now—stronger foundation, better material. Everything good life has to offer us waits patiently behind the curtain of memory. All we have to do is lift it softly and take a peek. The peek is enough. The rest happens on its own.