prompt: match, title: birthday mediation in misc. flash fiction

The bad news is there are no happy endings in this life, as nothing really ever ends at all.

You might get sick or might get healthy, might get married or divorced, still as long as you draw breath, there’s something new tomorrow. For better and worse, the good things don’t last but the bad things don’t last, either. We’re here for a little while, but in that while all kinds of crazy stuff happens to us. At birth, That Madness is in full swing, and after passing, That Madness continues without us. Our only real end is death and, even then the still-living need to just keep on truckin’.

Good news is, other than death, there’re no endings in this life, as nothing really ever ends at all.

It ends for every single one of us, yes, but it never ends for all of us. There is always another path to walk, a new person to meet, something new to learn, as long as you can hang in there and keep on waking up the next day. Change will come, but if you can manage to keep your heart open up, change isn’t something to fear, it is a bunch of new things you get to learn. If you manage to not harden inside, if you don’t let yourself fall into pretending the past was better than it really was.

My pop once told me every new morning’s just a new lottery ticket, every day’s a new long-shot chance for some amazing thing to happen, something truly beautiful, wholly unexpected, maybe completely out of your own conscious control. He admitted to me that it was just like the lottery, that it usually didn’t happen, but you live long enough, simple math will bear out that you get to see a couple of them. As I have. I’ve gotten a handful of those probability-breaking days myself, and no matter how bad things seem, I remember they’ve happened before, they can even happen again, if I can just hang in there and keep moving forward, somehow.

Hell, that notion may be the only thing that got me through Dad dying far too young, his words clinging to my exhausted bones like a cloak, protecting them from the slings and arrows of all the outrageous fortune entailed in being alive. Might be the only reason I made it to forty-five.

Our lives are all boxes of matches, you know. But even though we’re never sure how many we have left, we get to choose how we use them. Some exhaust their supply burning worlds, some simply immolate themselves on purpose, others still instead will light up hearths so other folks can warm up and get some rest. Usually I’m in the last category, but tonight I light a candle for myself and meditate on how best to hold to my father’s commission. Tomorrow morning might be a jackpot yet, just gotta hold on and witness what happens next, with an open-minded heart.