Clarity

There is a thin line below you. It stretches over a gray ocean filled with fear.

You don’t know how you started. You can’t remember your name. But, there you are… walking along that tight line, trying not to stare at the waves.

You don’t want to go forward. There’s nothing there. You don’t want to retreat. That must be where you came from. There are no options. You end up frozen, suspended in an iceberg of your own inaction.

That’s when the sharks come. Their teeth are made of terrible metaphors. Their eyes are glazed with the cynicism of a thousand misremembered memories. You won’t have time for the ocean to shrivel your skin with remorse or regret, now. The sharks will eat your blood and leave your bones to wash up on the rocky shores of resentment, for the gulls to pick at.

That’s why you have to look up, and take one step. One. The ocean is still always there. There is no end in sight. The sky is the same color as the waves from end to end. There is only the place where the tightrope meets the horizon, fuzzy and far and unknowable.

You have to take that one step.