“I know what I have to do now. I have to keep breathing because tomorrow the sun will rise.Who knows what the tide could bring.”
The lines from an old movie moves through me like a quiet sermon, softer than scripture, sterner than any counsel I’ve ever received. It makes no boast of certainty, offers no grand prophecy. It just stands there, salt-sprayed, weathered, honest.
No words soothe me better. No Paulo Coelho lines, for all its desert omens and alchemy, ever captured so precisely what it is to be shipwrecked on the strange island of one’s own life, watching everything burn or drift away, realizing there is no map, no promise, only the next breath. Only the bare possibility that the sea might offer something, anything, to build with.
And yet I wonder if I’m hiding behind those words, If they are my way of saying: I will wait. I will do nothing. The tide owes me a raft.
Sometimes I fear I am begging the world to mend itself for me. That if I wait long enough, the chaos will swirl into order without my hands getting dirty. But the mess is alive. It has its own wild designs. It does not want to be fixed. It only wants to be seen, to be accepted as raw, breathing truth.
I suppose I have always believed in magic. Not the “rabbit out of the hat” type, but something older, stranger, the quiet rearrangement of chaos. The way life breaks, then reshapes, as unwarranted as those unexpected messages in a bottle. The new path revealed when the old one is devoured by the sea. Perhaps that is my god, a force that promises no safety, only change.
And that magic has threaded itself through my life without fanfare, in quiet, improbable moments that stitch a story together. It was there when I found her or in those chance encounters or in stumbling into places, I didn’t know existed: like a hidden bookstore in an alleyway, a cliffside trail that opened onto a view that stole my breath. These turns weren’t sensible, not meaningful in the tidy way people demand meaning. They were just moments, strung together by an unseen hand into a story, not a neat one, not a grand one, but alive with its own strange rhythm.
As a boy, I was certain magic was real. I saw it in everything: in the way dust danced in a sunbeam, in the way arguments dissolved into tears and embraces, in the way seasons peeled open like pages of a book I was too young to read.
Older now, I know magic does not erase pain. It does not prevent loss. It does not rescue me from responsibility. It only assures me that nothing stays the same. That the tide, indifferent and faithful, will rise and fall, delivering wreckage or salvation, or both tangled.
So I keep breathing. Not because it guarantees redemption, but because it is the only vow I can keep.
Because tomorrow the sun will rise. And who knows, truly, who knows, what the tide could bring.
Comments
Post a Comment