There is no “return to normal” in our days ahead. We would do well for each other to loosen the grip we have on what was once a familiar feeling and a well-worn rhythm. It is now only an echo. 

Let it be an echo. 

The needle has skipped for the last time on its journey around the grooves of that beloved album, the one you bought with your own money that you saved up from doing common things like mowing a lawn or cleaning a dish.  There is new music startling us back to consciousness.  There are new roads with unknown bends.  There is a widening horizon growing with the glimmer of unexplored mountain vistas.

We will feel the urge to grasp for all that is slipping around us. Our hands will reach and our arms will contort to catch what falls. Our eyes will blink and blur from the spray of dust born of a million pieces of an old concrete life falling to the new earth that shifts around us and below us, sticking to our eyelashes. 

We will look to the sky for a familiar star or common ray of sunlight, even as the sky swirls with colors and shapes we do not recognize. There is no beacon to guide us to safety. For once, safety and comfort are merely sirens drawing us to the brink with melodies we knew by heart. Yesterday has given all that it can to us. 

Lean forward. 

Take three long breaths, and now step with the faith that allows uncertainty to also be joy.  

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It is comforting still to believe that we will wind our way ever closer, through this labyrinth, toward each other, while the distance grows between what was once, and what is now.