Sunshine and Rain

The past few days, the weather has been indecisive. The sky has been perfectly blue except for the black clouds, swollen with rain, that sit separate and singular throughout it. It’s not just that rain has come and gone. It’s that the weather has been different on opposite sides of the same street. It has rained on me while sunshine gleamed ahead, and vice versa. If that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is.

I feel things really deeply. It’s a blessing and a curse. I take everything to heart, and then I keep it there. I carry it with me always. I’m not good at letting things go, though the world insists I must, though wisdom tells me I should. I don’t really know how.

I can’t reason my way out of emotions, as much as I’ve tried, as much as I continue to try, as much as I wish that I could. I can’t talk my way out of love or out of hurt. I can’t argue my way into happiness, out of sadness. I can’t pretend I feel differently than I do, even if I want to, even if I shut my eyes really tight and wish and wish and wish…I’ve never been good at fiction.

I’ve never actually gotten over anything, though time has taught me to move forward. All of the good and all of the bad has stayed with me. It has shaped me. It has given weight to my life. It has made it heavy.

And that heaviness has felt both as deep and pure as sunshine, and as dark and ominous as rain soaked clouds. It has felt that way both separately and simultaneously. It has changed from moment to moment. It has been as indecisive as the weather.

It was one of those days when I laughed and I cried and at times I couldn’t distinguish where one ended and the next began. Sometimes I smile when I give bad news. Sometimes I tear up when I’m really, really happy. There’s no way to explain this. I’m just very full.

I walk through this world with everything. I carry so much joy and so much sadness that sometimes the lines between them get blurred. Nothing is as simple as a single definition. Life is far too complex for that.

My love for the world can destroy me. It is also what saves me. And at times when I’ve wished I could feel less, I’ve also hoped to never have that wish come true. I don’t know how to stop loving. I don’t know how to stop feeling. I don’t know how to stop carrying the weight of each moment within me. I don’t know if I want to.

I do know that the heart is just a muscle. It pumps blood, that’s all. My body is just science. It does what it’s supposed to do. But my feelings are unpredictable. They are as confusing and beautiful as rain in sunshine and sunshine in rain.

And although I saw no rainbows today, it’s another good metaphor for life, for my life, that I could still feel an entire spectrum of colors.

Missing

I sat on the edge of the cliff, propped up against my favorite tree, writing. A storm was coming. The ominous clouds moved across the sky, casting shadows on the valley below. One field fell into darkness, then the next. I watched them disappear. I scribbled away at the pages, determined to fill them before they were drowned. I raced against the elements.

There had been posters along the way, bold face type pleading for attention, big round eyes and an inviting smile. I stared at her picture. I stared at the word “missing.” It is a sad word, a lonely word, a word that pleads with a tender kind of hope. Find her. Help her. Please.

Her body was found at the bottom of the waterfall. The posters stayed up for days. They haunted us.

I didn’t know her. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her at the guesthouse next door, dancing with the others on the porch while they banged their drums and sang their songs to the mountains. But she could have been there. She could have been.

Or she could have already left for her walk into the woods alone. She could have already been on the path to the waterfall when the clouds, swollen with rain, began to slowly emerge above the peaks. She could have already been standing at the falls, listening to the rushes of the cascading water quicken. Faster and faster, it fell.

No one knew exactly how she fell with them. Perhaps she slipped, perhaps she jumped, perhaps the wind nudged her to the edge. No one knew if she was gone before she hit the water, or if it was instant, or if she lay there crying out for hours before the darkness came. Whatever happened, she left this world alone.

I thought of her as I sat alone, perched on the edge of the cliff, another storm making its way into the world. Six large birds flew above me, hovering on the fast approaching winds, escaping those places where the rain had already begun.

I wondered if they had looked for her, if they had seen her final moments on this earth, if maybe she hadn’t been alone after all. Maybe this flight was a tribute to her, or maybe, she was this flight. She was the birds and their wings and the air beneath them. She was the impending rain and the shadowed fields and the earth that shook with thunder below my naked feet. She was the pages of my journal and the words I would fill them with. She was gone, but also still here. She was missed, but also no longer missing.

I do not know what death is. I have no idea what will happen after I’m gone, but I’d like to think, I’d like to believe, that the birds will know the second my heart stops beating. I’d like to believe that they will take me in their gentle wings and, if even for an instant, allow me to hover above the world and know what it feels like to soar. I’d like to believe that I’d see below, poised on a cliff, scribbling away to evade the imminent rain, a young writer who has only just begun the long story of her life.

“Yes,” I will think to myself. “I was only beginning, too.”