theatre of smallness
(they’ll see it in your eyes)
Tears rolling down the cheeks of you
will never not be funny —
not the kind of funny that makes you laugh,
but the kind that makes the universe tilt its head and say,
look at them — still trying.
I saw you shimmering,
dancing in soft light
under clouds that looked like the backdrop of a theatre,
painted to make everything seem beautiful,
grand,
infinite.
And for a moment,
it was.
For a moment, the world stretched wide enough
to hold every version of us that could have been.
But then the clouds turned darker,
your tears fell,
and suddenly everything folded in —
the sky, the stage, the sound of breath.
The vastness became a room,
and the room became your silence.
Funny, isn’t it?
We live on a rock
floating almost endlessly through space,
surrounded by black holes,
seven planets,
and an infinity of unnameable things —
and yet,
the tears in your eyes
become the most important thing in sight.
How human of me
to choose smallness over wonder,
to place meaning inside moments
that were never meant to last.
And then there’s the ache of it —
how everything you put your heart and mind into
finds a way to leave.
The spiritual call it God’s timing.
The mentors call it a lack of consistency.
And the people who love you
don’t have a word for it yet —
so they build their own stories
about who you were supposed to be.
But maybe it’s none of that.
Maybe it’s just that to create
is written somewhere deep in the human soul —
to build, to love, to lose,
to keep trying anyway.
Because what else are we supposed to do
on this spinning rock,
if not pour meaning into the meaningless,
light into the dark,
heart into the hollow?
They say the greatest threat to man
is not death or destruction,
but the absence of meaning.
That’s the quiet kind of ruin —
when the galaxies go on spinning
and you’re still standing there,
trying to remember why it mattered.
And maybe that’s why we cry,
why we keep painting clouds
and calling them heaven —
to make the unbearable vastness
feel a little more human,
a little more ours.