The Curse of Knowing
We are the only creatures
who know the shape of nothing.
Not by touch,
not by sight,
but by the mind’s cruel gift
of looking beyond itself.
Before the first breath,
there was no waiting room of souls,
no quiet hallway of light.
There was not even darkness.
There was no “there” at all.
And one day, there will not be again.
The trees do not carry this burden.
The tide does not rehearse its ending.
The sparrow does not wake at dawn
and calculate the odds against existence.
They live inside the moment
as if it were the whole universe
because, to them, it is.
But we stand in time
with one eye on the cradle
and the other on the grave,
condemned to measure every joy
against the knowledge
that it vanishes absolutely.
We love while knowing
love will be erased.
We build while knowing
the hands that build will rot.
We speak while knowing
the last word is silence
so complete it erases the speaker.
This is our curse:
not that we die,
but that we know we will.
Not that we came from nothing,
but that we can imagine it
and call it by name.
And yet, inside this sentence of awareness,
something defiant still rises.
We laugh, though laughter proves nothing.
We write, though the page will not survive us.
We reach for one another
across the thin instant called “now,”
as if to say to the void:
You may have before us.
You may have after us.
But you do not have this moment
while we are in it.
And in that brief rebellion of consciousness,
that flicker between two eternities,
we carve meaning out of nothing
and call it
a life.
WJS
