Hemingway said to write the truest sentence you know

I think I am sad.

Sad to fly, to experience, to know

The traveler —

Sad, to be free?

And even sadder

When sitting alongside peace

An unfamiliar calm

Kundera said:

The unbearable lightness of being —

And I understand.

When the weight of the world

The burden, the pain, the obstacles

The bills, the kids, the hustle —

Those heavy crashing waves of darkness

Beat against your chest

One after another —

That man. The many men.

Heartbreak, loss, grief

The unknown, and nothing is promised —

The girth of it. The literal and

Physical and mental heaviness of it

Freedom is fleeting.

The anchor eventually becomes

Your comfort

Your stability.

A weight that keeps you grounded

Despair cries, and so do you

Loud and fierce but beaten

Into submission, you oblige

You conform and crawl beneath

The barrel of joy long hollow

Steel upon sulfur upon pewter dreams

Gone stifled and chorused

In a blue heat of arrest

But then one day —

You are light like dawn

Almost empty, and ascending

And floating above endlessly

The expectation of boundary gone wild

And you gasp

Am I alone?

Can I go here, or there —

Yes.

Nothing and no one is detaining you

The noose of submission has been tethered

And the sadness you feel for

Your captor gone romantic is perverse

But the reality is freedom pounding light

So light that your fist penetrates the wall

Fallen in Berlin style

And nothing is real

Just fabricated borders collapsing

And it is sad.

It is a dichotomy of arriving and —

Am I lost.

Used by the pillars of angst

Who am I now

Free?

Weeping am I behind a pink moon

A sigh so loud that no one looks

I am free.

And perhaps I am afraid of

How far I will fall

With no shackles to stop me.