seasons

the longer i drag myself up at sunrise, i see the necessity and prevalence of cycles.

these cycles seem to travel in constant growth and regression, bringing out a perpetual balance of warmth and light, stemmed by the unfortunate harmony of cold and darkness. the waves of sentience are saturated by crests of life & bliss crushed by troughs of death & heartache held together by the in between steadily sinking days.

sometimes these cycles are in the literal sense driven by life and death. i am reminded of the bedsheets that claimed the breath of my lovely aunt these two years past, where she met her end somewhere between the rafters and the floor. those sheets trampled hopes of shared laughter and endless music and milestones for her most precious daughters, and laid forth a unending hole where mother, wife, and friend once stood.

sometimes, these cycles are driven instead by deep set love and heartache. so fine is the line that divides our greatest love and ugliest agony at the affliction of that same love; the swelling of overwhelming adoration can topple and exchange itself for desolate aloneness. that same mouth that once spoke words that filled us with a sea teeming of joy piercing your breast and stealing that same joy.

but death must adhere to the same laws mentioned above; troughs too must rise again to the height of a crest, with time at least. in the case of my aunt, her daughters were the counter to the agony left by her eternal departure; they are uniquely able to shed the light that their mother lavished on those around her. with their absurd dancer legs and ridiculous humor, no one can forget the force that was the lovely billy gentry brown.

and the same goes for the heartache we all know and dread so well. those mouths that stripped the effortless side of love can bandage all those tears and breaks and erase all the wounds carved by their sharp words. with time those stabs we take at one another can turn into ways of understanding your love in new light, or ways of seeing bits of us we need to strip of ourselves.

sometimes, it may just be the cycle of sun to moon, budding leaves to stark branches, browning shoulders to winter jackets. either way, what goes down must come back up.