Firefly

A Story by Maria M.

When college is over and life is supposed to "start" this is what I have come to understand.

I want to know what it feels like to be alive.

At one point in time we all have it, that feeling, that way of looking at the world with those all seeing eyes: like you actually know what you are doing here-like the world actually has some sort of meaning. What happens is " nothing. You grow up expecting something to happen, a moment in time that will define you as a person, as a human being. This moment you expect will give you what adults call your purpose in life. You wait for this moment, knowing it will come; knowing because you have been told since infancy that you will “find” yourself, you will “find” the path which you are supposed to follow, you will “find” who you are “supposed” to be.

Well, what happens when that moment never comes?

Your mother tells you, go to school; learn, grow physically and mentally. You obey, you wait. The moment does not come.

You move beyond your mother and feel the warmth of another’s hand in yours, hoping; the moment still eludes you.

You begin to experience pain and loss - life in short, and you breathe a sigh of relief when the doctor tells you the news. Still there is no magnificent moment.

So you regress -- school it is, mother says. Four more years and you walk across the stage clutching your degree in your hands, your life ahead of you. But there is nothing, only life taunting you with your inability to figure out what you are going to do with it…

No one told you the truth.

They lied.

There is no moment.

There are moments: millions of fireflies eluding your grasp in the dark. Many which you never wish to catch, never wish to shed light on again. While there are others you wish never to have extinguished the light on. But you cannot save a moment in a jar. You cannot poke holes in the top and save it for your 21 year old self. You cannot capture a moment. Life is a moment"blink and those illusive lights flickering in the darkness will slip away into the silence.

So then perhaps they were right, only not in the way we thought they were. Perhaps we must stop thinking about the moments that we have lost, for we cannot regain them: stop thinking about the moments as they happen, for we will miss them as they pass before our eyes: stop waiting for a single moment to change the future moments in our lives, for one shall never come on its own.

Perhaps they meant to say that the moment when your life will show itself to you is the very moment that you decide to reach into the darkness; to turn the final page of your favorite book and find the light of who you are;

the blank page

that waits

because it waits for you.

Will you let its beautiful imagination slip into the oblivion...