Five-minute Friday: Change

Brittle leaves dust the sidewalks, evidence of the toll of summer's heat. It still hangs in the air by a few fingers, slowing releasing its grip, while shortening rays of sun signal change. Change! Change! Change! The air is humming, buzzing, whispering lazy lullabies, as it always does this time of year. 

One ear is tuned to the song, the other, tuning out. I'm not sure I'm ready. I'm not sure I ever am.

This city is aflame in change.  Both an organic and structural demonstration of what it is to be human in a world ever in upheaval. Impermanence. The inevitability of a place ever remaining preserved just as we hope it to be - or ever living up to our deepest hopes for home. 

We call it progress. We call it chaos. We call it growth. We call it loss. This digging up of roads, leveling of old buildings, raising of tiny-boxed high rises on tiny plots of land that has long since been paved over, a mass of concrete graves. 

Everywhere in this city, construction. Roads closed. Detour signs. Lines of traffic, cars sputtering exhausted sighs with the ever-exhausted humans inside. Familiar landscape gradually disappears, neighborhoods evolve, people migrate inward and outward, and the whole city sags beneath the weight of lives. 

And we sag, too, treading hard to stay afloat in this sea of change.

Somehow, we know beneath it all, this is a picture of life, though not life as we somehow, beneath it all, know it was meant to be. 

We ache, we yearn, we move through detours and crowded highways and clogged city roads; we work and play, eat and sleep, connect and tune out in our transit from here to there; we grieve in whatever quiet space of solitude we can claim, in the car, in the dark bedroom staring up at the ceiling, in the shower or the alley between buildings, beneath the trees with their arms canopied over us like guardians, beside the lapping waters of a lake, the loneliness of a crowd. 

And when change is astir, these four seasons a year, we wonder at the mix of unspoken sorrow with anticipation of knowns and unknowns, how it moves through us like a wisp of fog curling through a pre-dawn sky. 

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Linking up with Kate and the Five-minute Friday community. The prompt today is "Change."