Life on the edge

Life is always lived on the edge, whether we realize it or not. Sometimes we’re resting on the brink of something good – something we’re anticipating on tiptoes, waiting for a slight breeze to push us over. Other times we’re on the brink of something dark and ominous – of somewhere we don’t want to go, and we’re resisting the swirling gusts with everything we have. We spend our lives pretending we’re not on the edge, pretending we can step in any direction without changing where we end up. We lie with our backs against concrete rooftops, trying to grasp the misty sky. We close our eyes so we don’t see the darkness, imposing on ourselves a different kind of night. Self-imposed darkness is less scary, until it becomes an endless stretch of black walls we can’t find our way out of. We breathe and we sleep and we walk and we laugh, to push the darkness away, to create for ourselves a bubble of bearable world. Everyone tells us to make our own light in our bubble, but making light is a difficult thing to do. God did it with four words, but no matter how many words we scream into the space beyond our lips, we cannot force even one ray of light to appear.