It stormed for almost three hours here today and I don’t think it’s even really over yet. Consequentially, the light flowing in from the east is this strong but silent beacon, cutting through the heavy gray clouds and making my messy apartment look like a depressing, yet somehow hopeful old photograph or a faded memory. It’s a gentle reminder that the clock is ticking and my time here, both in Pittsburgh and it this particular space in time and my development as a human being, is continually inching closer and closer to its end. The fact that I know that clouds will roll either in or out and take this usurping beam of light with them forces me to accept the same about everything else in my life. The bad times aren’t here to stay and neither are the good, so perhaps I should enjoy them both for what they bring to my life and the challenges they pose to me as a person instead of loathing them for forcing me to exceed my self-perceived limits instead of settling into whatever comfortable life I think I “should” have made for myself by now.
In this blog, it is the small, seemingly-inconsequential things like this that I want to chronicle, want to remember, so that when I’m forty and looking back on these years, I don’t have to wade through pages upon pages of what did I or didn’t do to find moments like these in which I felt something. Or perhaps moments like these in which I, found something. This unexpected gift of nature helped me rediscover the beauty that is that particular brand of sadness which only seems to be manufactured during moments of fleeting beauty, that queer lump in one’s throat that’s only ever accompanied by a smile. I don’t know if I’ve come across fewer and fewer of these moments as I’ve grown older because fewer and fewer of them exist or because I have poured all my mental resources into ironing out flaws in my facade of adulthood and less into enjoying my the moments of my awkward everyday life and subsequently put less effort into recognizing something beautiful when I see it, but I sincerely hope that it’s latter; if there are more of these little reminders to hang on this life and actually live it out there, then I must harder to find them. Moments like this are those in which I feel the most vulnerable and human and by extension, the most alive.
As someone who constantly struggles to be “fill-in-the-blank enough” to be proud of myself and as someone who struggles to find the strength to stand back up on shaking legs and and try again when the odds are stacked against me, there is an immeasurable comfort in sitting here, staring out my window, and realizing that no matter how hard the rain falls, no matter how thick the clouds are, the sun will always find its way back into my life — all I have to do is look for it.