Paper Lanterns

I love the embodiment of lighting paper lanterns and placing them in the water or the wind –

I’ve never done it, but as we sit in the last hours of a year that won’t be forgotten, though for health and hope, it ought; a paper lantern seems a beautiful way to say Happy New Year while setting aflame the old.

And maybe that’s the we can do: forget the heaviness and hardship, the earth shattering, mind-numbing pain of unthinkable sadness, and only hold on to the love – and yet

There really is never one without the other, never pain without love, never sadness, never heavy or hurt – without, first and last, love.

So maybe not a forgetting, but a foregoing? A letting go.

Misunderstandings and missed opportunities drift up and away.

I close my eyes and place it all in a thin paper shell filled with fire – consuming wax and oil and eventually, I imagine, the paper itself – in a release of the last year –

Of the things we can no longer hold, but will not let us go – of pieces that won’t be picked up or placed together – let them burn bright in the darkness, smelling of paper and wax and love; first and last.

A light in the dark.