Alex.J.Cobalt

Imagine a Garden – Casey wrote in her diary to soothe her thoughts, and to give herself some hope. (Genre – General, Genre – PG)

Sadness finds me in the quiet moments.

Casey, you ask, how do you know that?

Well, you don’t ask that, but I know that it’s what people would say, if they could.

I consider sadness a companion. After all, every emotion is just as valid as another and trying to make the entirety of humanity permanently happy is ridiculous. You miss all those delicious feelings that exist between sadness and happiness. Each one of those feelings is something that people can feel.

Imagine a garden, if you will. During the daytime, the garden is illuminated by the bright sunlight. You can see all the plants and trees, every detail of every flower petal is there for you to admire. You can see the depth in the garden, how large the garden is and how full of life it is.

The garden, in this analogy, is life.

Then the sun sets, as the sun always does. Night time slowly envelops the garden, the shadows creeping over every leaf and branch until the entire garden is full of pure darkness. The sky will turn from a bright blue to a dull grey, deepening in its shades until the stars come out to brighten it. Now, when you look out at the garden, it is just black shapes in a nameless mass. You can’t see the flower or the individual plants anymore, just the outline of the most distant trees that fence in the garden, shilloeted against the lighter grey blue of the sky.

This is what I mean by sadness. It is not a sadness, but a lack of depth on the world. It is as if the world is flat and grey and simple, viewed from the lenses of someone who cannot see the detail.

Then imagine the moon.

The moon changes, it goes through phases like the sun does during the daytime. If you look up, you can just about see the craters across its dappled grey surface. You think to yourself, someone once stood upon that moon, humanity took itself to that distant satellite and stood upon that surface.

The moon, to continue the analogy, is hope. It is constantly there, always watchful over the dark garden and sparse outline of trees. It cuts a lonely figure in the sky, especially when a new moon rises to shine upon the night sky and blinds any stars further off in the galaxy.

Yet however lonely it is, it is always there.

What the moon, that hope, represents to someone is as unique as their fingerprint. After all, no two lives are the same, and no two hopes are the same either.

No matter what that hope, that distant far off wish it, I tell you now that it is always there.

Casey, you ask me, how can you say that from a place of sadness?

Maybe it is empathy. Some consider that I have too much empathy for others, others will consider me light headed and giddy with the simpler things in life. Others will consider me stupid, my paranoia will call me useless, but still I am here.

I continue to breathe. My heart continues to beat. I continue to stay alive.

And I continue to look to the moon, to that hope.

I like the idea of my knowledge, my experience of this sadness to impart some hope on someone else, and I know, dear diary, that you will consider me stupid.

No you’re not, you reply, you’re human.

Maybe that’s what defines humanity, its ability to hope. No matter how dark the garden gets, no matter how faint the lines on the trees or the plants are, the moon will always shine brightly above.

That is my thought for you today, diary, to tell you to hope.

Maybe, I can find some hope in that statement as well.