Light and Darkness

I’ve forgotten how it is to get up in the morning, determined to see life through another day.  I once moved with the revolution of the earth beneath me, catching each ray of sunlight to store inside my pocket, adopting a goldfish’s attention span, never remembering, always in wonderment.  I ran faster than the shadows in the sundial, and I reflected even the moon’s borrowed light back to it.  I didn’t need wings for my feet abandoned gravity.  Everything I passed blinked with the beauty of everlasting light, and I felt as if I would return to see them when I’d encompassed the world’s circumference—if I kept walking, I knew I wouldn’t be running away, but simply finding a better way to come back.  But then I learned to stop and bask in one of the material universe’s beauty—the world soul’s manifestation in you.  You glowed more than my stored sun rays could ever do, and I fumbled in my pocket for them but I realized they were drawn to you.  Opposite poles—you were the darkness, I had the light.  You only existed because I’d willed you to.  

And we walked together, you gathering dust and wishing you were air that could scatter them all over the world and mixing in with them as you do.  You had the need to exist everywhere; I let you be.  In passing, I had the need to breathe you in just like the dusty air you wished you were, and you let me.  You choked me.  And when you did, you stopped fantasizing about you owning dusts, and dusts owning you.  You started dreaming, instead, of roots.  That way you won’t have to exist everywhere and push yourself to be breathed in and consumed.    And you would always be there, you say—another sense of immortality.

I had to keep on walking, I told you, but you told me to stay still.  You said that the sand in the hourglass is running out.  You wanted to have a better idea—live inside a tree bark, age like the lines in a cut trunk, be the shore away from the waves that come frolicking to take us away.  I told you that I don’t want a mortal love etched on my habitat, when I’m almost certain it’s going to get cut off, and made into paper where penned memories vanish as quickly as soon as the ink dries out or gets washed off.  I assured you that however far we stay away from the waves, they will find a way to crash into us, and we would have to obey somehow.  I didn’t want shelter.  That is why I was never born with roots—I was never meant to want shelter and neither were you.

So I kept on walking while you made yourself comfortable in the company of rooted living beings that long to have your legs.  I watched the weak limbs of trees sway in the slightest bit of wind and saw how much they wanted to uproot themselves, to see how it would be to move with the earth circling in its axis—a movement they must have sensed every day and long to be a part of in action.  

I wondered as I walked on that if I kept on walking, I might only be finding a way back to you.  I believed I’ve stored enough sunlight—I have a suitcase full of the hot-cold rays that I have no use for myself.  I believed you’d created yourself makeshift roots to keep yourself immortal. I expected to see you, amidst uprooted trees and weeds that have acquired your legs and are packing off.  

But the trees remained on dreaming of legs to guide them away, to measure the earth’s circumference.  And you betrayed immortality that you promised me.  Perhaps you have promised it to someone else.  

Light has no right to exist when it has no darkness to loom upon.