When I was younger, I had the idea that reality was like a soft sheet,

If you were scared, you could cower back into the comfort of what you know to be home,

If you were angry, you could rip it to shreds,

And if you were ever brave enough to venture out of what you perceive to be known,

Then a whole galaxy of knowledge existed out there, waiting for you.

 

But as I grew older, the reality of that blurred line crystallized and set into my mind,

And I have come to realize the harshness of it all,

The fragility of that sheet, that truth,

The eeriness of the things left behind.

And I look back, at all the memories, with unforeseen nostalgia.

 

There is a part of everyone, which exists in the present,

But that other fraction of us, the true nature of ourselves, remains, still, stuck in the past.

It is the awareness of our history, the art of dwelling on something that we can never reverse.

We are all afraid of being stuck here, on this planet our ancestors were birthed on,

With recollections of tragedy, love, hate, forgiveness, and hope. 

 

However, in another sense, we are not just ordinary,

It is simply the way our minds alter reality.

Our souls, our identities, even our existence on this universe alone, is unique.

Reminiscing on the past is common none the less,

After all, we wish to be where our hearts long to be, wistfully.

 

But time does not slow down for us, in this reality,

It does not grace us with the ability to revisit our old lives,

It allows us not to take back what we regret, what we long to change.

We all fall into a routine, feeling as if time forwards as we are left behind.

It becomes melancholic, a sort of trance we never, until we die, wake from.

 

But the world does not stop spinning; rather, it is a constant,

The thing that holds us upright, while we grow to become Atlas, with the world upon our shoulders.

A lingering desire to be here and there and everywhere but near, all at the same time,

But we are merely here, and nowhere else, as we struggle to view past our perception of reality.

It is our choice to decide whether or not

We push aside those soft sheets and plunge into the unknown future.