Chinese Lantern

I was angry today when I drove to the library. It was not a new sort of anger--every red coal of it throbbed with something ancient and something never healed over but scabbed and peeled and torn open like the sun searing a trail across the sky. This anger belongs to the earth for as long as it has known conflict, but it was new to me. I wondered, as my hands clenched the steering wheel and as my feet gunned the gas, if there was a girl who drove this same street and felt this same way about the cold war, or about Vietnam, or the Second World War. 

I am angry that I am living the brightest days of my life so young. I am angry that I cannot look at the future and see peace and light. I am angry that I see snippets of what those in power are choosing for me, and what they are choosing for my nieces, and they are burning the world and the future before my eyes. Its like standing on the edge of a cliff at night time, and all around these little lanterns are floating (chinese lanterns in warm shades of hope and courage) and a cold wind is picking up at the edges of your senses, and the pitch of night is creeping closer at the edges of your senses, and your feet are pulling closer to the edges of the world, and you know that this peace and this light and this warmth are but a moment but in that second you want to cry for all the light that fills you in the moments before its gone. 

The lanterns have drifted over the cliff-face and down. Their light draws the darkness plunging after them, and the wind chatters and chills across the surface of all that is left to fill the void. Do we hurl ourselves off the cliff to follow the light and chase the warmth? Or do we huddle atop the world, stripped of all light but the light that nestles sacred inside--and do we take that light and let it change us, let it grow?

It is a fragile thing. It is stronger than we are. 

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I am so sick to death of wallowing in the gloom of a murky future. It makes me want to turn into an alcoholic and smoke a pack a day, just because I may not be able to in five years. I am tired of feeling powerless and like cannon fodder, and I'm also tired of feeling like a whiny spoiled rich kid for being angry at the world probably going to shit in my lifetime. That's just the thing though: if we acknowledge that we should be grateful for everything because we deserve nothing, then we also do not deserve to have our futures ruined by spectres of war and all yada yada. 

I'm irritated. I'm tired. Paris is going to happen in this country and I'm fed up with politics because what is the point in understanding things when no one ever does anything different?