Karma

Things that you’ve never seen before are not necessarily always extraordinary things. Just now, I saw something I’d never seen before: an ant in the elevator! I have never in my life seen an ant in an elevator before. Who knows how he got in there… and who knows how he’ll get out, either.
Humanity is often likened to a swarm of ants, but it makes me think that maybe some of us are like lone ants in elevators. We get stuck in there somehow; we keep going up and down forever, constantly exposed to anyone who looks our direction, and the chances aren’t very high we’ll get out without being sqished to the bottom of someone’s shoe. Some of us know there’s an out to get to, and some of us don’t. Either way, we can’t behave like a normal ant in there. So we can figure out a new way to live and just accept it, doing what we can to stay alive until we wither away, or we spend our lives frantically scuttling ’round the edges looking for some kind of exit.
And if you think about how few ants get into elevators to start with, you can imagine how rarely it happens that more than one ant will end up in the same elevator…

My favourite colour is purple, and my next favourite colour is orange. But favourite colours are complicated. I like a dark purple to wear, but a lavender when colouring or writing - and I like a very slightly darkened, yet vivacious orange that will jump out at you when used against the purple. I don’t much like pink except on rare occasions (like fluffy dresses, which I hardly if ever wear…). I like to think that green is one of my favourite colours, but every time I think of green, I think of a colour that’s brighter than a grass green but not light enough to be a spring green - a colour like generic green plastic, and I don’t like it. Then I end up thinking that green is good on grass, and that I look good in a dark, foresty green, and then I remember that chartreuse can look really nice… I have to qualify liking green for some reason. So I think I like sky blue better. A really light sky blue. A little darker than ‘almost white’. Especially when on black. I used a lot of gel markers the last couple of days - the new kind that look like markers, but dry as gel. I like watching the bright colours slowly materialize on the dark paper. I remember when gel pens were a huge fad. I always wanted some because they were cool, not because I wanted to be popular; there was no helping my social status. Thank goodness. I would be horribly different if I had worried about that back then. Now I can get all the gel pens I want and I don’t have to think about it… I got a purple one the other day. It’s metallic. When you write with it, it dries so that if you look close, the words themselves are in silver but ringed in a line of purple, like the ink somehow separated on the paper as you wrote into shiny bubble letters. I wish it didn’t show through on the back of the paper so much, but then again, the shiny ones are to be used only for special things anyway - and one usually doesn’t go front-to-back on special things. Which might even be on cardstock, because it holds up better and looks nicer. Just a thought.

Between a state of sleep and waking, your worst nightmare materializes, inches away from you. It is vivid, and sickening. The things you trust the most conspire against you, believing you blind, knocking your feet out from under you and raping that trust. Even when you rise against it, you end up in the same place you were, comforting that which you feared moments ago… only to wake the next morning and remember it as nothing more than a dream, a figment, a nightmare.
It is nothing so trite as a lesson; perhaps a sign. Whatever it is, this figment of the night is haunting, leaving no direct recourse and no memory of where you stood before it all hit you.
Somehow, though disoriented, you feel at peace. Perhaps now the worst is over.
But those words always echo in the eye of the storm…
In your mind, the shadows dance. They stretch and flail, like spindly flames, then shrink, to creep along the edges and slip through the cracks. What it might be. What it looked like. What they said it was, and how it shouldn’t have been. It tears at you.
So why does the calm remain?
It cannot be the resolution of knowing what comes next, for there is no way to know what must be done. It cannot be the comfort of justification, for the trust still lays broken at your feet. The only question which can be answered remains as such: who is left with the upper hand?

The things you truly need, though they are the most worthwhile to wait for, are the most painful to hope for. You must wait for them to arrive: when sought after, they elude you; when prompted, they become false. When you have found them, you will only know after many a harsh trial has befallen you, and if you must call out to them, it can only be done when the length of your silence can justify it - or it will be broken, and must begin anew.
Even a year is not long enough, it seems.

Sometimes it seems like something has changed, when it really hasn’t. The only thing that’s actually changed is what we compared it to. Take something for granted long enough, and if it goes away, you will be devastated; but when it returns, it may seem very foreign, and it may take a while to get used to it the way you were before - it is now compared to that period in between, thus seeming different when it really isn’t.
As obvious as it might all sound, it’s another one of those things I don’t think gets thought about often enough. I was thinking through a minor dilemma the other day, and when I thought about it this way, it seemed mind-numbingly simple and it was no longer anything to worry over. Things had just gone back to normal.
Perhaps sometimes it is a necessary thing, to get us to question what have come to accept; that short while when everything is better - perfect even - existing to tease us into action.
This has been a test of a change for the better. It was only a test. You may return to your normal activity…

Things don’t ever go exactly as you plan them, but that dosen’t mean they never come out just right. Today: My Vespa. For reals this time.
^.^