Your laugh

"Why don't we dance anymore? I'm not okay with that."

Sinking. 

Have you ever had that sensation like part of you is diving deep, never to surface again?

Like your heart is a weight. Your shoulders bow and your spine buckles from the burden.

You talk yourself into a posture.

Yet, inside you still feel it sinking.

Your heart is as if it were stone, and you grow weary.

Everything is frozen, yet around your life goes on, things bloom.

You're anchored to the gravity within,

tossed by a daily rinsing.

Passed over, covered in a cleansing water that could make you new,

but you're what lines the threshold. 

"The years go by like stones under rushing water."

Instead of becoming new, we find ourselves close to drowning.

Being washed again and again, but never rendering.

Wasting days only seeing things one way:

Watermarked. From below, looking up.

So when the rains are lodged high in the clouds,

we are uncovered.

Wedged deep in mud, with no hope of movement.

"We only know, we only know when it's gone."

But don't you miss dancing?

It doesn't mean we can't listen to a sad song.

It doesn't mean you have to sing along.

The bridge will carry you.

I know the waters of this river are overwhelming.

Sometimes it's suffocating,

but to dry up is no better.

So I ask you to see,

that this water that washes over you and me,

it's not to rinse us of our joy.

...

Joy is seeing dancing in the water.

It's not about forgetting to grieve, 

Fearing water, over us like rocks,

No I'd rather we feel it all.

But that doesn't mean dismissing joy.

"Why don't we laugh anymore? I'm not okay with that."

You drag your tired feet to the line and start to dance.

Tears as you turn, tears as you turn.

You're broken and terrified.

It doesn't have to be a certain way, just sway.

People join you under the lights,

You look up from your turning.

...

Caught by the movement of others.

Lost in the twirling of a little girl, who's curls fall behind her.

Mesmerized by the young love that trips on their shyness.

And you are delighted,

Delighted by the old man who abandons his bad knees to show us the previous generation followed the music much better than we can. 

And I hear a sound I almost forgot.

Your laugh.

*Lyrics by NEEDTOBREATHE in quotes, a reflection on their song, "Stones Under Rushing Water*