by Jackson Murray

Created on: April 29, 2009   Last Updated: September 06, 2009

Chasing the Wind

Her laughter rode on waves of silence, igniting the pale light behind her eyes. She crashed through my melancholy visions of paradise, breaking through the shadows I surrounded myself in while I hid myself from dying. The same shadows we all create in order to shield ourselves from the pain of living, yet some would argue that there is no pain in living, only pain in dying. They are right, except to those of us who have taken refuge from the pleasures of living, from the experiences of love and joy, from what truly happens when you let yourself die in order to live.

She came out of nowhere, from every where; the east, the west she had conquered and now she came back to tame the visions of her past. She was a wanderer, a sojourner, a creature of our genetic past who has walked the world on her own two feet, who has truly owned the ground she tread upon. The whirlwinds of chaos that must have come after I can only imagine; for she has left me in chaos, sifting through all I thought I knew and all I was afraid to know.

That is the danger of finally letting light break apart the shadows of your life. The chaos that resonates in the farthest reaches of you mind, the crimson embers that have always been inside. When you embrace the emptiness within you can control the speed in which the passion of life comes. It is the safest way. The other is when it is broken apart by a pair of eyes that light up a smile. This, honestly, is the best way, since it fills every crevice of your being; it chases all your demons away. Yet it rarely works out; the brightest flame burns fastest they say, the wind always takes it away. But this is best for it happens truly not by way of fear, but by surrendering to the rhythms of life.

I have felt like a leaf blown off the limb during the first hours of daylight in autumn since I saw that face framed by short black hair. The vision of those pale orbs staring into my soul is a picture I will always carry with me. It was the first step on my journey; a journey that really started when I was young, yet I didn't place that first step until well into manhood. Walls of loneliness had permeated my soul and dying became something tangible, the end to the journey of life, not the beginning of truly being human. Death comes for us all, it is one of the few certainties of life and there is a sort of comfort in that; but there are those of us who learn how to die on a daily basis. Kerouac taught me that. To live you must die; that mantra has been a staple in mythology and folklore, it is a philosophy that once mastered yields all the pleasures this life has to offer.

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