In the time that comes before
we'll live the best of our days.
We'll freewheel through fields,
trip the light beneath dayglow,
and collapse at dawn, fully spent,
the fruit of our joy squeezed to the very last.
We'll hymn the future as a land of exotic wonder,
our mind's eye occasionally spying an allusive watercolour vision.
But mostly,
we'll pay it no mind at all,
passing our time sunk deep into the endless sunshine our innocence affords,
until one calamitous day
when we're jolted awake from the great summer of youth
to find nothing is quite the way we expected.
Like a grand vessel run aground
we'll come to face an unnerving new perspective,
one that dawns slowly at first
but soon seeps decidedly into the core of every bone.
A grand deception has been staged
and as with the high anticipated meeting of the great Wizard,
we'll encounter a startling awakening,
after which things will never be the same.
Life soon begins to resemble the ongoing revolution of a perpetual motion machine;
always brimming with promise but never quite finding its destination.
The liminal becomes static.
The stasis becomes hypnotic.
The hypnosis becomes truth.
We'll spend an age cleaving to a vision in the faint distance,
only to find that the reality of the thing we so desperately sought
has cruelly transformed in the time we took to arrive.
Or perhaps it's us that's changed?
Either way,
that much pined moment of release -
that occasion remains stubbornly beyond our grasp.
No bother.
Like astronauts after the new earth,
we'll instantly replot our coordinates and continue on to the next,
serpentine channels of electricity unfurling to light the way before us,
festooned in the geometric patterns of our desire.
Whether the first or hundredth expedition,
our determination remains resolutely undampened.
And when, ultimately, we're told,
"that's all for now",
we'll say, "no, but I was so close.
I just need a bit more time."
But there's no time left.
And just as we start to recall the dusky glimmer of those halcyon days -
a memory now so faint, one begins to wonder if its but another hollow mirage -
just as the picture is pulling into focus,
the soft outline of each shape finding its form -
just then,
the icy hand of fate swiftly draws the curtain
and all before is lost.
In those last moments,
how it'll finally become so very clear:
after all that time looking ahead,
we failed to see what was right in front of us.
Our true content was found in the here and now;
in the voyage, not the arrival.
But never again did we know content
as in the cradle of youth
when we were voyaging nowhere at all.