Maybe it is just boredom that has brought me here, tired of human suffering.
Not because suffering is unusual.
Because it repeats itself with remarkable dedication.
I sat watching people today and couldn’t decide what they were actually chasing.
A better job.
A bigger house.
Someone else’s attention.
An argument they intended to win before it even started.
Maybe it wasn’t any of those things.
Maybe they were only trying to outrun whatever had been following them all morning.
Human consumption fascinates me.
Not because of what people eat.
Because of what they collect.
Certainty.
Validation.
Revenge.
Titles.
Knowledge.
Love.
Sometimes all in the same afternoon.
It reminds me of walking through an estate sale.
Someone’s entire existence arranged neatly across folding tables.
Wedding china beside fishing lures.
Baby shoes next to military medals.
A coffee mug that probably started every morning for thirty years sitting beside a lamp marked five dollars.
The owner is gone.
The objects remain.
Funny how quickly a lifetime becomes inventory.
I catch myself doing the same thing.
Stealing moments before they disappear.
Saving photographs I’ll probably never open again.
Trying to remember conversations that already belong to yesterday.
Maybe memories are the only things we ever successfully borrow.
The strange part isn’t wanting more.
It’s forgetting what already arrived.
Clouds still spend afternoons pretending to be impossible animals.
Peacocks still unfold galaxies nobody applauds.
A child can still spend half an hour talking to an ant as though they’ve been friends forever.
Somehow those things never ask to be noticed.
They simply keep happening.
Maybe that’s why children feel different.
Not because they know more.
Because they haven’t started negotiating with wonder yet.
There are days I think I understand far more than I should.
Other days I realize I probably understand almost nothing.
Those are usually the better days.
I keep finding myself saying the same thing.
Be careful what you wish for.
Not because wishes are dangerous.
Because every beautiful thing seems to arrive carrying instructions nobody bothered to read.
The view from the summit never mentions the climb.
The photograph never includes the blisters.
The applause never introduces the silence that came first.
Perhaps that’s why I keep drifting back toward ordinary things.
The cloud.
The breeze.
The child laughing at absolutely nothing.
They never seem to want anything from me.
At the edge of an old forest grows a vine that wraps itself around every tree it can reach.
It climbs higher each year, convinced the next branch will finally be enough.
Beside it stands a moss-covered stone that never moved an inch.
Years later the vine has touched the canopy but forgotten the ground.
The stone has gone nowhere.
Yet every morning the birds choose it first.
Perhaps that is why I find myself drifting between sorrow and joy like someone unable to choose which shore belongs to them.
One reminds me what hurts.
The other reminds me why it was worth hurting.
Then.
Almost without fail.
Boredom was never boredom at all.
Then.
I look up.
The clouds are still pretending to be something else.
Somehow…
They never seem bored.
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