Replay

In your footsteps there remains a void,

earth trodden too deep,

where the grass no longer has the courage to appear.

You took the light with you

so you could grow.

And perhaps that is what we all do:

like trees

pushing their roots through other roots,

taking from the world exactly what they need

to survive one more winter.

That is why there is so much silence
after great storms.

And the universe, whether infinite

or merely large enough to frighten us,

does not seem to forgive anything.

It keeps the accounting of all things:

of light displaced,

of loves lost,

of people who grew

from the ruins of other people or of themselves.

· · ·

Even our stories have edges.

They end abruptly,

like a film burned in an empty cinema,
where the last frame is frozen
on the face of an actor
who does not know he has already died.

And perhaps our story

was written before we existed.

Perhaps we live only the replay

of an old reel,

a cassette forgotten in a cosmic drawer,

rewound by someone again and again

out of boredom

or nostalgia.

And we call "choice"
merely the elegant sensation
that we can change the ending.

We feed on the idea of free will

just like actors

after the final scene,

even though the sets have already been dismantled.

· · ·

The world would be impossible to keep alive

had it not been written in advance;

and true chaos

is not destiny,

but the hope that we might escape it.

And so we move forward

obeying without knowing

an old and perfect script,

like disciplined characters

who confuse instinct with freedom

and silence with meaning.

And when someone, somewhere,
presses play again,
we are born once more
in exactly the same light

that we take, from (H)eaven and (E)arth,
so that we may exist.

◈ ◇ ◈