no place else

you see it always, can’t help it, even lost, you see it, tiny light down the hallway, a place to tiptoe toward, the hint of a destination even though you know it’s not the real one, not the final landing spot, resting place, not home exactly, but somewhere in between, and what’s lucky about that is you don’t think the world is out to get you, beat you down, encourage your failure and ultimate demise, which is why you allow yourself the luxury of waiting just past when others might flee, which is why you can keep yourself from fleeing, and here you are. not fleeing, even when one of your friends cautions you against staying in a relationship that may not have a future, a relationship in which the odds are stacked firmly against you, and if this were her she would have left long ago, but then again she never had your willpower, your trust, your faith in the unknown, your love, even, of uncertainty, and how odds stacked against you is to you a perfectly reasonable way to proceed, you have always been stubborn, and now, now that you have found a place for your love to land, you are even more stubborn, even more willing to test the faith of what you can’t control, and when your lover called you yesterday afternoon, when she dialed your number from a hotel three thousand miles away in order to talk to you, to hear your voice, to find a place of rest and assurance there, you saw it again, a tiny light down the hallway, something telling you not to leave just yet, not to abandon ship, not to get out while you could, when you might salvage something of your heart, and you realized that this was the only way choice, to come forward, crawling if you had to, out of the dark, toward that light, that there was no place else for you to go.