Look up, Elias

​

The sky, circling in blue and orange has

turned into an alchemist?

Elias has stopped trying to name it.

Orange into blue into something

that has no colour yet,

the colour of light that arrives

near the end of things

and seems to know it,

seems to be

watching back, in greys.

Elias keeps walking.

This is the whole discipline now —

to keep walking

under a sky of vapid judgment

and not turn away 

and not explain yourself

to anyone,

not even to yourself,

specially not to yourself

not anymore.

We are not

the rational creators

we tell ourselves we are.

We do not choose towards joy.

We choose away from the face

we are afraid to meet later —

the older self

standing at the back of every room

we ever entered,

arms folded,

already knowing how it ends.

Elias chose some things for that reason.

The safe harbor.

The door not opened.

The words not spoken

on an evening in another city

that he can still locate exactly

in his body

thirty years later.

He was trying to protect himself

from regret.

He did not know

that unlived life

accrues its own interest,

His fear was right —

to choose is to lose

what was not chosen,

but not to choose

is to lose everything,

including the self

that might have done the choosing.

The unchosen accumulate.

That is what no one tells you.

They do not disappear

when you decide against them.

They stand at the edges of the field

in weather like this,

patient,

unhurried,

waiting for the colours

to catch up.

The mistakes are not

the worst of it.

The mistakes had weight,

had consequence,

had the dignity of having

actually happened.

You can walk the perimeter of a mistake.

You can know its dimensions.

It is the unlived things

that have no edges —

the person you might have become

in a different city,

the love you almost let

be as large as it wanted to be,

the room you stood outside

and did not enter

because entering felt

too much like falling.

The sky deepens.

He does not look up.

He has made his peace

with most of it,

or made something

that resembles peace

from a sufficient distance,

which may be

all that is available now.

The field is wide.

Elias is small in it.

He knew this would happen —

not the field exactly,

but the feeling,

the late light,

the sense of being

a figure in a landscape

that was always larger

than his plans for it.

He keeps walking

because the body still insists,

because stopping

would require a reason

and Elias has outlasted

most of his reasons,

because somewhere ahead

the field ends

and he would like to see

where.

Not with urgency.

Not with fear.

Just with the quiet

faithful attention

of someone who has learned,

too late and exactly on time,

that the present moment

was always the point,

that the sky was always

doing something extraordinary

above whatever field he crossed,

and that he looked up

far less often

than he should have.