key word "spring" title "springs eternal" in misc. flash fiction

We have this thing broken in our minds, as women and men, where when things become good, something subconscious starts to assume this is just the way that it is now. The good times will continue forever, if anything, they’re only going to get better. This amazingness with us, this moment now, this is the new normal.

We live in a place that’s cold. We live in a place that for centuries back, as far as the folks we stole this land from can even remember, always had six weeks of the world’s most beautiful spring and six weeks of the world’s most gorgeous autumn counterbalanced by two months of blackfly-choked soup-sweatbox summer then a half-year of wind-swept frigid despair. It’s why you can buy a two-family house around here for a pair of boots and a sandwich.

We had a few years there, just a few, one hand’s worth at best, where the winter was mild or was short or was both and now all the sudden, we gripe at our bookend of blizzards Thanksgiving and Easter. It was always that way on an average, but a short string of flukes and we suddenly started to believe we lived in Savannah, not at the edge of the Adirondacks. Mormons in flight from dire persecution chose parched Utah salt-flats over this tundra, why would we be anymore blessed?

This is of course not a bug, it’s a feature. This is how we rose from caves and trees and how we kept going, to eventually rule and ruin this earth, the instinctive push to believe the tough times were fleeting if we just got over that next ridge and when we got ourselves to the little milk and honey, it would keep flowing forever. It’s how we’ve overcome all kinds of war and diseases as a species, even though for any one of us, this hope is probably madness.

Destiny’s your potential, where you could go at the highest expression of what you are. Fate’s where you end up. In storybooks, these two become conflated, confused, become the same. We do as such in real life too, except in the real, it’s not always true.

Were life box-scored like a ballgame, I would have led all leagues in missed opportunities for success from the ages of twenty-two to thirty-two. I had me a Hall of Fame decade of botched chances, more than most people get in ten lifetimes and I managed to blow every one of them. Yet here I am, still plodding along and that thing similarly damaged inside of me is why.

We’re broken for a reason, a lifehack by life itself to keep us going even when the act of moving forward is more stubborn stupidity than anything noble or true, keep us going through the back-end of this seemingly endless cruel winter we still inhabit. After all, it’s always said hope springs eternal, that hope’s spring’s eternal. Hope is spring that’s eternal. Lush eternal spring.

Last updated April 12, 2018