Beautiful Ache

I must not, under any circumstances, succumb and watch Before Sunrise this week. I feel the urge tickling my neck, itching my imagination, begging me to revisit the film I've secretly hidden in the archives of my brain as the favorite movie I'll never mention as such.

 If I do, I'll drown in my imaginative urge for the whimsical and lose myself in one of those achingly beautiful moments that leaves me lost in my hunger for more beauty- even though the beauty of the experience itself was only so beautiful because it was passing. 

I'll weep myself a saltwater lake, not for the lost but for that which never was and never will be. I'll weep a lake for the end of a moment that was only ever meant to exist for a moment and even in the stories I weave lacks a satisfying resolution.

When, amazingly, the desired is given a second chance at life, an opportunity for the lost impossibility, it falters. It shudders under the weight of expectation and seems ugly and unsatisfying when it is all it ever could be, and as beautiful as any dream revived.

Still, with realism on my brain my eyes will nevertheless scan the horizon endlessly, seeking and finding beauty in others and moments, my eyes the highway through which this joy will enter my body, and my chest tight and contracted as I squeeze the emptiness it leaves inside me. Like a smell that never satisfies but leaves me inhaling more and more deeply, trying to swallow through my lungs the unsubstantial air it floats upon, I cannot feel completed by the joy that is so present and intangible.

I don't have time for such fantasies. I have jobs and work and the life I love. My brain says I'd rather be lost in my work than a whimsy.

But my heart, so cold and only now so slowly warming, begs to be allowed to love the fantasy and return the dreamer to her place in my body. The struggle, won by the winter even through the summer's swelter, begins a war that is being waged in the crevasses of my soul as the smell of approaching autumn wrinkles my brow. And I wish to be spared the heartache- to remain in my icy hermitage for a little longer, to freeze calmly through another winter and emerge rational at the summer even as I long to dream and love with abandon again.

I'm not ready for the happiness that explodes out of you so fast it hurts