The Shrinking
Spectrum
Once, you could become anyone.
What happened to all the others?
Everything is still allowed. You could be a poet, an astronaut, a baker, a thief, a small god of small kingdoms. The world has not yet asked you to choose.
Some doors close before you notice they were doors. The unborn lives drift away as quietly as breath, and you mistake their leaving for growing up.
You choose a city, a person, a discipline — and each yes is a thousand quiet refusals. The shape of you starts to look like a someone in particular.
Most paths are ghosts now. You are good at this one life. You no longer remember being someone who could have been anyone — and the forgetting is the loss.
The spectrum is narrow but bright. The roads not taken go silent — not gone, just unwitnessed. There is a particular peace in carrying so few possibilities.
What is left is not less. It is dense. The few possibilities still alive are sharper, heavier, more luminous than any of the thousands you began with.
Excitement is the felt
weight of open futures.
This is why a five-year-old vibrates with possibility, and a forty-year-old does not. Nothing is broken in the older life. The cone simply closed, the way cones do.
To remain a little excited, then, is to keep cutting new openings — small ones, sideways ones — back into the narrowing.
Possibility is not a quantity.
It is a kind of light.
Carry some forward.