Elephant in the Room

I want answers to all of life’s questions. Like right now. I want to know everything about everything about everything, and I want to digest it and I want to eat sleep and breathe it with every molecule of my being, with every beat of my blood, with every breath that I take til death do us part. I want to fill each moment with the truest, purist, most honest, unfeigned answers to quiet all of the questions that feverishly lash my brain. I want to unveil the mystery, the secrets, the “what-the-hell-is-it-all-about” that is a noun, a thing, the elephant in the room of all of the rooms in all of the places in all of the world.

I want to get to the bottom of it. I know I’m not supposed to. I know I’m supposed to sit cross-legged and breathe deeply and live in the moment and find peace in the experience, not the analysis of the experience. I get it. But I’m obsessed with the why and what and how. I’m addicted. I want to know, want to know, want to know. I want to know how I ended up here. I want to know why I was blessed with two of the most amazing human being as my parents. I want to know when it all will end. What it feels like when it’s over. I want to know how everything just seems to fall into place, and even when I’m digging deep into the dark, a part of me grows toward the light.

Because tell me there isn’t a reason. Tell me it is all happen-chance dumb luck. Tell me deciding out of thin air to move to Boulder, Colorado where I served my future husband a Grande 7-pump Chai Latte was a fluke. Tell me the psychic who told him he would meet a “petite blonde-haired blue-eyed” woman who would be his wife was full of it. Tell me those magical moments when we plummeted into love were anything but magic. Tell me Angelo met the head of Oncology one month prior to finding a lump because he was lucky. And that the head of Oncology got him in for tests and diagnosed the next day because of good fortune. And that his cancer turned out to be aggressive and rare and God knows where he would be today because he was “in the right place at the right time.”

I think there is no right place at the right time. The right place at the right time is every single moment we live and breathe. It is here now and yesterday and tomorrow and it is twenty years after we are gone. No one holds the answers to our questions. And twenty years after we are gone, no one will hold the answers to our questions. Our children and their children and their children’s children will be left with the same unanswered questions and the weight of the mystery.

And as for us? When we are gone? When it’s over? We become the mystery. We become the answers. We become the truest, purist, most honest, unfeigned answers to all of the questions. And we whisper life’s secrets into the ears of the elephant that carries us in the room of all of the rooms in all of the places in all of the world.