Coping

And she lifts heavy eyelashes over eyes weary, and feels the years weaving through her bones in grinding slide, as that many regrets. She can't believe this is the world everyone lives in, and the life they all clamor to get through daily - it feels like such a waste of emotion and humanity. In the end, it all amounts to needs and lacks, to making ends meet for next time. To live, one has to exist and survive first, which leaves them spent and empty to any enjoyment. Death of the spirit by exhaustion.

And she drowns in her music - willingly, gladly, with aching relish -  as the only instant when she touches life, fleetingly, like threading her hand through a swift, icy mountain stream - for the rush of brief, sweetly numbing pain. And she dreams her song of ideal, her illusion of permanency in a world of inconstancy. Choking on air by want of hope.

And when she cries, she weeps with her songs, for it reminds her that she does love everything and everyone else, despite all and beyond any reason why she shouldn't - couldn't. She's cleansed and born anew - trusting and humane again.

And in the end she can see that it's what everyone does to move on, too - find their own niches to breathe freely through life, in small pleasures, held intensely for brief eternities. To long existences, survival by living sparingly.