A good adventure never takes you where you intend, and the one I have been on has become good. It wasn’t but days ago that I was staring out at the world, disgusted with the monsters who still live out there, the worst kinds. The human kind.

Oddly, it wasn’t long ago that someone I knew had died – an ex-girlfriend, one who for a brief and stunning period of time was a part of my life – and her husband messaged me out of the blue to tell me of her passing. Like most of us, she had her own demons and owned them as best she could. It was an awkward conversation for both her husband and myself, one that marked the passing of someone who was different and the same in our lives. She and I would roll 20 sided dice, much like the one to the left, and we would laugh and play silly games where we outsmarted and slew monsters. Amethyste is gone. The monsters remain.

Then there are the monsters we carry with us for a variety of reasons, the ones that leave us scarred, maybe even unfeeling in parts of our lives, and we must be ever so careful that we do not become monsters ourselves because of these blind spots. We are imperfect and it is only fitting we are: We are held to a tyranny of a normalcy that society teaches but does not practice, a contrast in what we are taught society should be and what society actually is. We may see ourselves as failures sometimes, hunching next to a comfortable fire in our caves that we have piled with the wealth and poverty, both, of our journeys. We will see ourselves as what we once were even as we allow ourselves to fade away, to recoil from the harsh contrasts between what is and what should be. Or we could dance in that hypocrisy and pretend it doesn’t matter, a flip on the allegory of the Cave, we can simply move our feet to the rhythm and have blind faith that the precipice we’re dancing toward has a soft landing if we step just right.

I chose the cave for a while.

And now, with a roll of the die, I am outside again, deeply disturbed by what I see. Everyone is shouting even though it’s pretty clear that almost no one actually understands why they are shouting other than being upset. We do not find comfort in each other because we do not find stability in each other. Some are not ashamed because they have no dignity, some are ashamed because they have too much. The world spins on, uncaring of dignity and shame, keeping the time of a rhythm that is longer than our lives. Our heartbeats are like the water rolling across river stones, making sharp edges into smooth edges over millenia.

We are inconsequential in the moment other than how we impact each other. On how we slowly allow the water to flow over us to smooth those edges, not in our lifetimes, but over generations.

It is time to awaken.