The Only Way Around

Sometimes there is beauty through pain. Like little dust motes in the sun, it twinkles out at me in the darkest of times, sometimes comforting, sometimes taunting.

There’s another world, the motes say. Follow me.

And I do.

But as soon as I focus on one, if I am lucky enough to have a moment to chase it, it vanishes, replaced by hundreds of other motes with hundreds of other siren songs.

Sometimes I want a small cabin in the woods where these tiniest of stars might exist by the thousands. I want to stay there in that dusty place and watch them as they dance all day long through shifting shafts of light coming through a window. A fictional window I imagine.

Other times I want to be somewhere large, somewhere decidedly artificial and yet just as comfortable as sitting alone in a forest. Somewhere clean. I want to walk through impeccable museum rooms in my mind as if they are groves of trees. All alone, I take a nap before those paintings that most catch my eye so that when I wake up, those brush strokes are the first things I see.

Pain. Sparkling pain; not all bad, not all good.

It's not impossible, living.