2004-01-12 - 3:57 p.m.
go ahead, push your luck, find out how much love the world can hold; once upon a time i had control and reigned my soul in tight. well, the whole truth is like the story of a wave unfurled and i held the evil off the world. so i stopped the tide, froze it up from inside, and it felt like a winter machine that you go through and then you catch your breath and winter starts again, and everyone else is spring-bound. and when i chose to live there was no joy, it's just a line a crossed (it wasn't worth the pain my life would cost), so i was not lost or found. and if i was to sleep i knew my family had more truth to tell and so i travelled down a whispering well to know myself through them. growing up, my mother had a room full of books and hid away in there, and father came raging down the spiral stair till he found someone, most days his son... and sometimes i think my father, too, was a refugee. i know they tried to keep their pain from me because they could not see what it was for. but now i'm sleeping fine. sometimes the truth is like a second chance - i am a daughter of a great romance and they are the children of the war. well, the sun rose with so many colours it nearly broke my heart and worked me over like a piece of art. and i was a part of all that. so go ahead, push your luck: say what it is you have to say to me. we will push into that mystery and it will push right back (and there are worse things than that. because for every penance that i could think of, it's better to have fallen in love than never to have fallen at all. when you live in the world, and you think about who you thought you'd be... now i laugh at how the world changed me and i think life chose me, after all.
dar williams, "after all"
