There’s gonna be a day when it just doesn’t matter anymore.
The people that walked away from you, the people who forgot your birthday, those two friends that slipped you the Judas kiss before their grand exit? None of that is gonna matter.
You’ll stop crying at the kitchen window. You won’t scrounge for pennies to buy another pretty handbag or another carton of ice cream. You’ll stop feeling like you’re anchored to the bottom of the ocean. Your eyes will dry and you will wear pretty dresses again. You will ride a bicycle and dance to cheesy pop songs like you did when you were sixteen.
There’s going to be a moment.
And it’s going to be random. It will knock you right off of your firmly planted feet. All those places of indifference that you dug your heels into, all those little holes of independence where you buried those worn out feet. Those little walls of dirt will fall; the ones that, if they could talk, would tell tales of when you said “I can do this alone” and “I’m not going to let myself feel so deeply again.”
That moment is going to come…when something pulls you plum out of that stubborn stance.
And it’s not going to be a moment of pain that pulls you up. It’s going to be one of incomparable joy. It’s going to be a quick second, when your guard falls and you let yourself experience true joy. Because if you open yourself to joy, you re-open yourself to pain. But in that joy, those past pains; those moments where you swore you’d stop breathing, those will seem as far away as the moon is tonight. Because if you let it, a second of joy erases a lifetime of pain.
All those years of trying, hurting, unrequited affection, they will just scoot away when you decide to realize that it wasn’t all for nothing. Because it brought you to this moment of joy. And you wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be the person you are, wouldn’t know this joy… had not it been for that pain.
Because without pain, how does a human in its fallen state, measure joy? To what do you compare it? Because you have not yet fallen into perfect joy, so you must learn it on a measurable scale. It must become seemingly finite to you, in order for you to understand that it is infinite.
Oh, the pain won’t matter. The sadness that once swallowed you will lose, if you just let the joy come. It is already there. And if you just take a breath, just quiet yourself down and wait, that moment is going to come.
and when that moment comes, you’re going to ride a bicycle and wear pretty dresses again.
ASHLIN BOYLES 