One Day Things Will Work Out And I Hope It’s Tomorrow
One day, the right stars will align themselves, and you’ll find yourself where you should be. In the morning the sky will burst in pink and gold, and the sunlight will pool around you. The universe has tipped itself in the angles of impossible, and you will find, it has all fallen into place.
The cracks in your heart, they’ll remain, no amount of sun filtering through can fill them, no laughter can, but you will know, like everyone who has lived through a sadness, any sadness- that you will fall into the gravity of tomorrow. It’s inevitable. You aren’t the first person to want to just disappear in your duvet in the morning, and you won’t be the last. You’ll wake up, and the half-second infinity when the morning sun washes the tips of your eyelashes white hangs on your shoulders like a curse. You’re still alive.
It feels like a terminal sort of sadness, the sort that lays its weight in the middle of your throat, choking you. But you’re alive, god damn it, why. Maybe you will forget, maybe you won’t, but know that even that little kid inside the fancy restaurant is unhappy (father is never around), that successful acquaintance (is not satisfied), that beautiful neighbor (hates herself secretly). Your sadness could be the sadness of someone flitting from one place to another, unable to find a space in the world to fit their shadows in. It could be sadness for that person who has come to pass, whose warmth cannot touch the house you have shared since you have been brought in this world. Your sadness could be the sadness of that puppy in the pet store, its tail tucked at its side, staring at buyers from its cage and hoping it finally gets a home.
Your sadness could be defined by the things you considered personal failures, or expectations you couldn’t fulfill no matter how hard you tried.
It could stem from that dream of yours you could never chase after just because you were scared to discover it really wasn’t meant for you; that sadness when you see that the heroes in your youth are eaten by their own weaknesses, lying in hospital beds with their heartbeats playing the coda to the IV drip. It could be the sadness of being the only one left behind, the sadness of not being able to translate the noise in your head and the scars on your skin into conversations with people whose understanding and presence you need, because they are never sharing the same page as you, or the same space.
It could be the sadness of someone who spent their life hesitating, even in telling someone they loved the people around them, and it’s too late, because most of them have filtered out of the door by the time the words were ready to spill out. That sadness might be integral to who you are now, and you will carry it around, folded in your back pocket, but it’s not everything. It feels heavy, and it doesn’t seem like things can get better. You keep going back to it, opening it and feeling each sad thought from under your fingertips until the words cling to your skin. It feels indefinite, this sadness, like it has occupied centuries out of all the lives and afterlives you could ever pray for, and not even that could kill you. But don’t give up yet, even though it feels like your skin and bones are eggshells cracking under all this weight. It could happen later, while you are walking down the street, while you are watching the translucent clouds sail above your coffee, or tomorrow, or next year – the universe will rearrange itself, you’ll be doing something you think is worth waking up to everyday, you’ll be around people whose sadness you want to erase.
You’ll feel a smile tugging at the corners of your lips, lifting the lines in your face and coloring your eyes with the sun. You’ll feel that distance closing between you and the good things meant for you, and you’ll find people who understand even the pauses in your breath. We could get pushed in that direction, dragged to it – we could walk towards it, run to that destiny. We’ll get there.