If you stop right there, I’ll bring back the sun

March 29, 2007

If you stop right there, I’ll bring back the sun

It’s funny how things transform out of context.  I saw this quote, standing alone, and thought it was a lyric or verse.  Two people were conversing – one of them pleading with the other to stop self-destructing, promising to help make it all better, if the other could only stop doing the thing that was affecting them both, right then.

It’s hard, watching someone take a particular path you know will cause them harm.  When you want nothing more than to help them, but know they’re just one step away from crossing the Rubicon.  As you watch them move forward anyway, carelessly or defiantly, the few seconds required for that irreversible step stretch into a regret that lasts for years, if not a lifetime.

In movies – well, most of them, at least, those few seconds are a turning point for the main character.  The guy runs into his apartment building’s hallway, tells the girl that he doesn’t care how badly they screw it up so long as they can be together.  It’s beautiful, and romantic, and unrealistic. 

Another way to look at those few seconds, though – the only way that lets me stay sane, is to see them as an opportunity to go in a different direction.  To do something with my life that I wouldn’t have before.  I may have closed one door, locked it, boarded it up and cemented it shut – but that doesn’t mean that what’s behind door # 42278 won’t have its own, different sun.

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