Even My Everything Would Never Be Enough

The sky I see is the same sky you see too; yet somehow you see it at a different time, when I am elsewhere, anywhere but where you are. It is very hard to truly believe we are living under the same sky, peering at similar shades of blue, when on your end of the world, everything is so different; and on my end, well, everything stays very much the same.

I guess I just want to write to you and tell you that it doesn’t feel real anymore, that any of it happened. It hardly feels real that you could be living in the same world as me, in the same universe, living such a different kind of existence. You see, in your photo, you’re there with her, and the view is this gorgeous, fairytale landscape; and in mine, well, while the view is nice, and the sky is pretty, the other side isn’t quite as grand. The venue is beautiful, the people are lovely and dear to me, but somehow it feels so old, so stale, so confining. Like with you for a brief moment I was free, freed from this very same existence, yet years later I find myself right back where I was, deeper entrenched in the quicksand than before.

And I can’t help but wonder why some of us get stuck, having to face the daily threat of sinking completely, when others live above ground, their feet light. It’s just, I have been trudging with this heavy mud, this magnificent resistance causing me to lag behind; yet still I see you, I hear you telling me to run along, to run faster, to be quick by your side. But you do not see the mud beneath my feet, you do not feel the grip of the earth’s grasp; you have lived your entire life walking on the ground, and I have spent my entire life trying in every moment not to be buried far beneath it. And I want to run, I want to soar, I see the wind in your hair and the cheer in your step, and I want to join you, grab your hand. How unfair it is, how painful it is to agonize over this juxtaposition, this comparison of opposites, this clash of culture and this demanding world.

I wanted for so long, to keep up; to keep running and pretend that I too had light feet, that the mud did not exist, that it did not bother me, that it didn’t hold me back. But the older I get, and the deeper I sink, the harder it becomes to lift each foot. The longer the gap between my steps, the farther behind I fall.

So perhaps I’m not resisting it anymore, this slow decay; perhaps I’m letting it have its way. Because when I was young I thought fate would save me, or sheer brute force would prevail, or that my determination would see me through like it always did. But I was naive then; I thought I was greater than the earth, I thought my resolve was stronger than the ground from which I was created. I thought I could break the very laws that formed the universe, simply because I wished it so ardently to be so.

But a wish is not enough, desire is not enough, lamenting is not enough. And that is perhaps the most difficult bit to swallow, that everything is sometimes not enough. In another life, I would have given you everything. For you, I would have given every last drop, every last bit of me – but even then, it would never have been enough.