Chasing

These words burn and blaze. For all of their screams and cries, it is not pain, but passion. These words find no reverie. They find only clamor. But a beautiful clamor. These words live in heated harmony. They live as the animals do. In a beautiful tapestry of destruction and rejuvenation. As the natural word requires death for life, so do these words require contradiction. They find meaning in contradiction and so much more than that: they find that ephemeral, fleeting truth.

Meaning and love and happiness elude me. But what’s more is that they flee from me. They flee from me like a child or a dog, full of jubilation, begging me to chase after them, glancing behind only to ensure that I am in pursuit, giggling the entire way. But I lag behind. Through fields and forests, I chase after them, never truly touching, only close enough to think that maybe I could. But I do not feel without love or without meaning or without happiness. It is more. Much more.

I do not entertain meaning or love or happiness in my grasp. They do not exist as they are. They exist in motion: in excitement. It is another feeling. Deeper than meaning or love or happiness. The raw, primal feeling of existence. It is life, and all that it is, encapsulated in some ineffable sensation.

And so, when I feel this, even for a moment, I am filled with the familiar sense that everything is going to work out. That anything, despite everything, will be alright. But is that itself a contradiction? Should you find such a sense of closure despite malady? Should a life aware of so much that is wrong ever be calm or happy? Certainly not. But as I said, the feeling is not happiness or love or meaning. It is something else.

It is a feeling that is invigorated by reality. It savors the pursuit for happiness, the struggle for love, the search for a better world and a better way. It is not born in success, but nor is it destroyed by failure. It is above these notions. It exists above outcome, above victories and defeats. This feeling crawls through the doors of past and present and future. It mingles with the whole of time. It flirts with past lovers and future strangers. It engulfs all of me in its grasp, pushing me forward beyond all else.