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Writing > Child-like >
I am afraid of you, little one.
You look around at your world. You see things that are out of reach, yet you are not concerned. You do not care to think where everything should go. When you are compelled to reach you ask for help and you trust openly.
My world to me is not so different than yours is to you, but I am afraid. Every direction I face stretches off to a horizon that is so far away. I will never go everywhere, never touch everything, never know where everything goes. I travel listlessly, casting myself away from simple hopes and childish dreams.
You look at me with simple wonder, and I squint at you with guarded confusion. To you, I must seem capable and hopeful. I can reach those high places and I know where things go. I am strong and can move anything to help you. I am full of stories and can explain everything. I know so many combinations of words that it must seem that my tongue can never run dry.
Close your eyes and imagine yourself at the beach, with its sand between the toes of your bare feet. Walk through that sand and feel it shift, kick it and feel it fly, skid through it and feel it flow. There are so many little grains of sand, each their own little self. In your eyes it is a beach, and that’s where sand goes. Sand is doing what it’s supposed to do, be sandy. It gets in your shoes and in your hair. You lay in it and build little castles from it.
To me, this beach is filled with sand deeper than I can dig. Each grain is its own little person with its own story. There are more grains of sand than I can count, more than I can name and more than I can understand. I have always saught to know the reasons for everything, so to me this sand is there for a reason, as everything must exist for a reason. Each grain came from somewhere and will go to somewhere. Everything that I think I can touch, I try to grasp, hold and know.
Your beach is beneath your feet, my beach goes on forever.
Imagine that it is night, and you can look up and see stars. The stars fill all of the sky. You could turn your head, and spin your body and see more and more. To you this image is like paint on the ceiling above your bed. It is there, but only just out of reach. Stars are something you know the name of but don’t understand. They are embracing and comforting. You see their beauty.
To me, I look up and feel how distant they are. I know I can never touch one nomatter how far I go. They burn bright and hot and consume any who could hold one. To me there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on your beach. To me the black of the sky would be thick and bright with them, but most are veiled by the air I breathe as I gasp in wonder.
To you things are just out of reach. You feel comforted that one day you will grow tall and reach out to do all the things you used to want to do, to understand all the things that confused you.
For me, I have come to feel that so much is out of reach. I have accepted this with a measure of regret from the futility of having tried so hard and never stopping to wonder why reaching matters.
You trust that all things that matter will be learned.
I fear that all things matter and nothing can be known.
