Blueberry Picking

Life is such a finicky thing. One moment, you think you've got it all figured out, and you think you're cool, and you think that you can handle it, and you think you're going blueberry picking tomorrow. You think, take each moment as it goes. Don't rush anything. There's always tomorrow. The blueberries won't die overnight. We'll go blueberry picking tomorrow, and the sun will shine. Even if it doesn't, that's okay, because we're going blueberry picking.

And then suddenly, the sun doesn't shine anymore and you pass the blueberry field on the way to a great white building and fear turns into a solid rock of nausea, the kind you can't swallow or dissolve or even throw up. It stays there and it only has one name written on it, and it's not your name.

Life likes to let you take things for granted. The sun, for instance. Did you ever wake up in the morning, afraid that the sun wouldn't peep over the horizon? Did you ever feel like every ray of light was a pure miracle from heaven? The sun keeps the blueberries growing, but we don't really think about it. We never open our eyes and look at the blueberries and think, that's amazing. We just know they're there.

But now you're standing beside the bed and you're looking down onto the face of an angel and you're thinking about those blueberries. We were going to go blueberry picking today. You say that out loud, but there's no response and suddenly you see those blueberries turning into tears and coming out of your mind through the windows we call eyes.

We used to stand out by the lake and count the waves. What a silly thing to count. There will always, always be more waves, no matter how many come in and how many fall out. There will always be more waves. We take those for granted too; like the sun and the blueberries. We counted the waves, and when a particularly large one came along, we'd count it as two. There were always more waves.

Does infinity minus one make any sense? If one wave was missing from the ocean, of one ray of sunlight escaped your eyes, if one blueberry dropped from the bush, would you notice at all?

And now you're watching the one you love so much, and you're wondering why you never said anything before. It was always "tomorrow." The sun's going to rise another day. There will always be another day. I'll never miss just one blueberry...

Well, what if they never loved you back? What if you were just one of those friends, the ones that you said hi to when you saw them at the mall, the ones who belonged to the birthdays you never remembered. What if you weren't anything important? Well, then, you wouldn't miss that blueberry. But at least you'd know. You wish now that you had told them what you thought every day since you met them, ever since the day you first knew that they weren't just another wave on the ocean. It is a risk worth taking.

We were going to go blueberry picking today. You stand here trying not to cry, or perhaps trying so hard to let it out... let it out, keep holding on, don't let go. It seems like the sun will never rise again, and the ocean never produce another wave, and no more blueberries... we were supposed to go blueberry picking. And you're broken now.

You bend over. What can be appropriate to say?

"We were supposed to go blueberry picking today," you whisper. "And I always thought there'd be one more blueberry, one more wave, one more ray of sunshine. You know. And I'm sorry. I was wrong. You were the last blueberry, and I'm sorry I never told you I loved you. I ran out of waves."

And the light seems to dim a little, and perhaps the crashing of the lake is a little softer, and somewhere, you can hear a blueberry drop to the ground.