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A Candle in the Wind (Chase Miller - New Orleans, LA)

 


I’m ready for my story to begin. Ever since I was a kid, I always felt like I was born for something greater. Sure, I sound like every melodramatic human out there, but cliché or not, I think that’s how we all felt inside. We all thought the world was exciting and brand new, and maybe that’s because everything is exciting and brand new. Our birth was a match that lit a candle, and we hoped could burn all the air that we could to embolden that tiny flicker of fire into a second sun, radiant and timeless. We felt what I am feeling now as I type this. A feeling not unlike a current of electricity, powering every skin cell in my body to lift the very hair on my body. This stream of energy has fueled every aspect of me in the past, but somehow, that current has gotten blocked for some time. Although maybe it was never actually blocked in the first place now that I think of it.

Sometimes, it feels like life does its best to leave us stuck at a crossroads, wondering where to go and if we can ever use a car or even a private jet instead of having to walk the entire way to whatever our future destination is. My intuition tells me that cheating is wrong. Maybe walking is the only way we memorize the path? Besides, if we got there so quickly, would there be any point to traveling in the first place? So, let me catch my long, lost analogy up. That trickle of voltage hasn’t been obstructed all along but simply rerouted, again and again and again. I’m not sure if there’s any meaning to where we direct that energy to or what road we choose at those crossroads, but it must count for something, right?

 

Of course, we all will have our flame blown out some point; no star burns forever, or something like that. While we have a hundred years or so to soak up all that oxygen and all that lightning, I think we really need to remember to make the most of it. Yes, I sound like a fortune cookie. Yes, these words are a bit self-indulgent. Yes, wildly, I do believe in what humanity brings to its timeline in the universe. The great problem is that we seem to be blind to what we truly bring into existence. While our power may seem elusive, we all have one, at least that’s what my inner nine-year-old fantasy brain likes to think. We search and we search for any kind of meaning we can grasp while being blind-folded most of the time, stumbling to discover who we are and what we bring.

 

Musing to myself about my quarter-life crisis has me wondering what I’m even feeling or trying to say in this moment. I just want the world to know that we’re all not alone. We all are required to wake up one day and choose to start and keep moving, whether its one foot in front of the other, one stroke of the wheel on the proverbial wheelchair, or swimming in knee-deep shallow water, we can’t stop our path no matter how we like. Hell, I believe in reincarnation and even death doesn’t stop us then, according to my belief system anyway. We are a locomotive train, powered by iced coffee and a strange will to be defined by the amount of numbers we own on a screen. The scary issue about our unrelenting force is how late we realize it and how terrified we are that time has run out on us, hoping and praying that our candle in the wind will stay alight.

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