Throwback to 2005

[Note: This is an unedited piece from October 2005. I am reprinting it because I can.]

Day by day, this savage world rushes on,
Cruelly, spontaneously giving and taking.
The world is six billion people feeling alone in a crowded room.
It’s the song we don’t know, and that one we can’t forget.
Life is the water rushing up to meet the sky.
That feeling that tomorrow can never be as good as yesterday,

but pretending that there’s no where to go but up.
It’s time flattening every single word that’s ever been uttered,

both idle and earth-shattering, into equality by passing years.
Time makes everything useless.
We will all be passed by and we will fade into obscurity.
So what is this life then?
“They” say that life is blood coursing through a heart, air rushing into lungs,

and synapses in the brain.
But haven’t you ever felt dead inside your own living body?
That’s because life is purpose.
It’s meaning.
It’s that stinging moment of clarity when you realize for the

first time that someone actually cares.
Maybe it’s discovering that you care.
Life is jumping straight into the deep end with all your clothes

and baggage and for one second in your lifetime

not caring what gets damaged or exposed.
It’s the vulnerability that we all own

and yet are so scared of that we fear what showing it might do.
It’s the million weapons we all own,

but fear what extreme damage they could truly do if unleashed.
True life is reckoning.
An adding up of what you owe,
But learning to overlook what is owed to you.
It’s the day when your preconceptions are destroyed by a surprising friendship

or discovery that the character inventory you took of someone

was wrongly and grossly underestimated.
Time causes that increasing anxiety as it goes on

that you can’t get back any of the days passed.
It’s because you can’t.
Time causes you to regret, feel inadequate, and despise yourself.
But it also teaches you.
You learn to appreciate making it through the rough times.
And you learn to hold onto friends that never gave up

even among the sea of friends who did.
And, most of all, you learn to cherish the times that are irreplaceable.
Life is many things; many different things to everyone.
But the one universal thing life is for those six billion strangers wandering the earth

is something not to be wasted.
And we’re all guilty.
It’s time for reckoning.