“There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.”

Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), Dutch Scholar

When you first get on, its easy to assume it’s just a slide, a rather long slide. 

You don’t know how far away the end is, you can’t quite see it. The only way you will know its over is to feel. Feel that everyday gets a little easier, and you recognize yourself starting to walk again. The first steps may be slow and heavy, but you’re moving forward. Sooner than you know it yourself, you’ll find yourself running. You’ll be running like you’ve never ran before, feeling the dopamine rush through your mind. You are on top of the world, where anything is possible. You’re totally unbeatable, being the best version of yourself. You feel like floating in ecstasy as you spread your soft wings.

Looking back, you see not a slide, no, rather you see a million depths and another million heights. You realize you’ve been on this ride longer than you dared to think at first. Maybe even forever, you have been a fellow passenger. 

You keep on going, flying, which you better enjoy, because in only seconds, it will go straight down, deeper than you might ever have been before. Even though a rollercoaster always come up again, and you know that, it won’t feel that way. You’ll forget that you even are on a rollercoaster, you’re left all alone in the dark depths with no visible escape. It becomes unbearable to go on. You feel suffocated by the gloomy mist, as it almost stops for a while. It feels like forever, why can’t it just go up again?

The urge to put a leg or two out of the cart grows stronger for every second, and around you, you see too many fallen birds, who didn’t get to take the ride up again.

It’s when you accept that you will be stuck on this rollercoaster forever, that you will fasten your seatbelt. Even though it may be hard, you’ll learn to get through the depths, and heights of the ride. There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other. It will be hard, but if you try romanticizing the carousel, everything will become more bearable.  

Opening your eyes, you can see that you are no longer the only passenger aboard, rather you are surrounded. You are surrounded by others. Others who through all this time, have been in the same depths and seen the same skies as you, but in different colors. There are a thousand pairs of wings surrounding us, including our own.