Kaleidoscope Magazine

I used to reach for it; long for it.
My fingers reached across the fabric of time,
tangled in threads of unspoken dreams,
half-remembered, half-imagined.
I envisioned it soft and wild,
A whimsical land of endless beginnings.
It was the place beyond the present,
where time bent to my wishes,
and the road ahead was a glowing path of possibilities.

I chased it,
with eyes wide,
a child running through the fog of tomorrow,
her heart pounded with the weight of what could be,
but wasn’t yet.

The closer it got, however,
the colder the air grew,
and my feet, once eager,
dragged against the ground of what was already fading.

As I drew nearer,
the light of it began to blind me,
its sharpness cut through the softness of the past.
I reached,
and only found edges of the harsh angles of a world I couldn’t quite grasp.
It came to me in pieces,
each fragment too heavy to hold,
too sharp to touch-
shattered promises,
unmet eyes,
A place that cracked under the weight of its own expectations.

It is no longer a promise,
a wish,
A wonder,
but now a demand.
It pulls me,
forces me,
compels me to shed what I know,
to burn away the skin of the past,
in order to enter its bright, unforgiving light.

The future is a blade and I am the wielder.
It cuts through my hands as I try to hold it,
and I wonder if it will leave me empty,
a shell that once held dreams.
The shadow of the past now feels faint and familiar,
like ghosts of a life I once knew.
I feel them tugging at my heels,
tugging at my heart,
their whispers of things I never said,
places I have never gone.

It was a door I once yearned to open,
but now it stands too close,
its edges pressing against the bones of the present.
There is no turning back.
The future does not wait.
It pulls me forward,
forces me to live in the space between now and then,
a place of constant motion,
where nothing stands still.

I ache for the past,
the blissful ignorance against the harsh reality,
but the future is always one step ahead.
Never still,
always moving,
always changing,
like a river that can never return
to the place it once began,
and I am swept up in its current,
unable to swim.