letting go

sometimes you stand on the threshold of change... that pivotal moment when you are standing precariously close to the edge, about to let go of "what was" & fall into the unknown of "what will be"... but before you do, you turn around & look back at where you came from.

you look behind you & see things from an entirely different perspective & wonder how you could have led yourself so far from reality. you see with a new clarity... and you wish you had been awarded that clarity before you accomplished making such a great big mess of the road winding backward from where you now stand.

you stare as far back into the past as you can see. back to that place along the horizon where the land & the sky meet in a tiny pinpoint... and you see that things you thought were good or worth having were nothing more than illusions you created for yourself. things you dressed up to hide their ugliness. things you told yourself were so much more than they ever could have hoped to be. things you clung to that turned to dust in your hands because they were never what they pretended they were. and you realize that you knew this all along but held onto them anyway, like cheap plastic toys from vending machines, that you, in childlike foolishness, thought were somehow valuable if you tried hard enough to believe that they were.

you look into the past & see nothing but a vast emptiness, clouded only by wisps of smoke as they rise from the remains of what you thought were, at the very least, memories worth tucking away.

something in you clenches & twists, wanting to finally release that which never should have held your attention at all, things you held onto for reasons that are no longer clear... and you take the tiny pieces that are left. you hold them in your hands like so many grains of sand. you look at them for a few moments, wondering why you thought you could fool yourself into believing they were ever something you wanted. then, one by one, you let them slip through your fingers, falling away from you & being carried on the wind to be mixed with all the other grains of sand that exist, indiscernible, unremarkable, meaningless, hardly worth even the tiny space they occupy in the great scheme of things.

you watch them fall away & suddenly your hands are empty. they are clean & open to new possibilty, no longer dusty from the past, ready to finally hold a treasure of infinite value. and instead of looking at the ruins that lay behind you, you turn your gaze forward again...

to promise. to hope. to beauty too precious to even envision.

and all at once...

you let go...

and fall...

realizing that the past is forever gone from your view...

that you have carried none of it with you...

and you wonder what will be there when you land...