You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue

I've got some regrets.

A prospect as a prospect is a thing unrealized, a raincheck on a promise, a vision of a conjecture. Reasonable maybe, rational even, but still in a thing in potentia, ephemera suggested by the negative space within a real structure. Guarantees are for suckers. Guarantees are for the people who buy the extended warranty package on their brand new car.

This isn't me complaining, don't misunderstand. There's a certain cosmic fairness in the unromantic cruelty of what is. I have a hard time settling on the question of whether that would be harder or easier to see if I were of the type more given to a mythopoeic cosmology, with the odd juxtapositional anthropocentric ego of it all (really, there's an omnipotent creator figure the size of the universe and he gives a specific shit about YOU?) contrasted with the abnegation of the human will in service of the divine. A belief in both a waiting ear for your pealing misericordia pleas and in the ready-built acceptance when it's clear He/She/They* have opted to let you twist. There's nothing in the cycle of an insistent supplication and the prone humiliation of surrender that gives away the hand all the believers seem to be holding, even when we all know if they turned them over, it would just be a bunch of weird tarot shit they'd be allowed to assign value to however they felt.

The lesson in that I guess is that comfort is what you make of it, in the same way closure is a gift you give yourself. It's not something you arrive at, it's something you do.** There's no closing the gap between where you are and what you see. For every gap traversed by a bridge of solidly walkable spontaneous light, another one falls away from itself, opening into an untraversable wound that will never scar shut.

It can be lonely out here when you're unspoken-for by any deity or pantheon. The upside I suppose is you can't be forsaken if you were never saken in the first place. There's darkness, sure, but an existence devoid of magic means there are no monsters lurking in the darkness either. It's just a state of being that wants for a candle.

Asking for no help from any imaginary friends also means, when the inevitable recovery manifests (and, as long as you don't die, it always, always manifests), you get to claim all the credit for that shit for yourself. And when you say "thank God," you only mean it as a cultural artifact of a metaphor. Really you just mean you're glad you're you.

I have some regrets. And as a companion piece with last week's nonsense, I can see how this entry would maybe induce a sort of thematic whiplash. But they're really the same thing. Well, OK, they're actually opposite things, but that should just make you think of that Chinese-y circle thing with the two sperm cells locked in an interracial wrestling match forever. It's up and down, it spins and spins, but it only ever goes forward, toward hope.

(Until someone invents time-travel. As soon as going backward is an option, there's some closure I'm gonna un-close, believe it)

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*Today's blog is not the blog where we figure out god's preferred pronouns

**Credit where credit is due.