Like Trying to Strike a Match Underwater
Everyone knows about sparks
You spark a match
And once it’s lit
Nothing can ever be the same
From friction to chemical reaction
A heat that spreads
On oxygen, it feeds
Changing anything in its path
Never to be the same
From dust to dust?
No, from form
To ash
“Once I did that…”
They say,
“There was no going back”
And they all want to know about those single sparks
Those big bangs
“Let there be lights”
Inciting incidents
Story is a beautiful construct
Belying the limits of memory and perception
It’s an interview
Of a partial truth
Like putting you into a room
Having you stare out of a window
And asking you to tell us what’s going on in the world
Scientists say that the universe
Is just one bubble floating in a quantum foam
Jack Johnson sang that,
“All of life is in one drop of the ocean
Waiting to go home”
I remember how last summer I almost drowned
Lifeguard helped save my life
Lied out on a towel afterwards
On the verge of tears under a bright sun
Body still shaking
Still wet
The context of my near-drowning
Defies all of my carefully constructed narratives
My near-drowning said nothing about my identity
And drowning was not something I had set out to do
I would not have died for my beliefs
Would not have died in the act of creation
I was on a family vacation
With a family I love
But often feel separate from
Sometimes these days
I get lost staring
Thinking about those waves crashing over my head
My distance from the shore
And the exhaustion setting in
And they say
That if I almost died that day
I must’ve learned something that day
There should’ve been some epiphany
Some new realization
But so far it’s been like trying to strike a match underwater
I know that most of the world is covered by water
Most of the universe is empty space
And the largest quantity of energy within it
Works as the opposite of gravity
Instead of pulling anything close
It pushes everything away
And what a sad ending to this story…
It’s just like one bubble popping
In an infinite foam.
