Coming Home

I keep picturing what my life would look like if you weren't in it. You can't blame me, can you? Times like these are nothing if not a deadly pestilence of what-ifs.

What if there was no one to go back home to? No one awaiting the sound of my key turning more and more with each breath they take, with each conversation we have, with each thought that drifts them to sleep and each dream that wakes them up. Not a single person imploring me to employ every fiber of my being in the relentless practice of one and only one task: to hope.

Hope... that life on Earth will prevail, as undeserving as it is.

Hope... that humans as a collective will be unblinded by imagined demarcations and arrive at the miracle of a renewed consciousness.

Hope... that the fruits of sanity may bloom and ripen in the thousands among those whose hearts seem especially barren and yet whose need for a fresh perspective surpasses all others'.

Hope... of greater clarity, higher resilience, fuller joy, and true, lasting empathy for our fellow survivors.

But I know that simply harboring an omnium-gatherum of desires in my head and my fingers will result in their accomplishment almost as surely as my knowledge about anything concerning life and existence beyond the infallible, "One day, I shall perish."

Everything else I thought I knew about the world lies already in the depths of the deepest, darkest sea. However, my list of certainties hasn't been reduced yet to this singular resignation of a sentence, for there is another - an instinct, a security, a guarantee, a fact even, that defines me in ways far more endurable to my upright zeal and downright hunger for life.

"One day I shall perish.
Until then, I am yours."

Do not be mistaken. Without you to come back home to, without you awaiting the sound of my key turning more and more with each breath you take and each conversation we have and each thought that drifts you to sleep and each dream that wakes you up, I do not lack a reason to hope for all the miracles towards which so many of my own dreams go barrelling these days. All I lack, in the absence of you, is any knowledge exceeding that of my elemental vulnerability, the knowledge known to human beings as 'purpose', 'destination', or my preferred iteration in this context, 'the sense of belonging'.

I keep picturing what my life would look like if you weren't in it. There would be no one to go back home to. There wouldn't even be a home.

Photo by Valentina Locatelli on Unsplash