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creative Sorry about the flip out. You can read if you want. Just give me the illusion of privacy, meaning DON'T COMMENT. And don't get offended.
I saw a rainbow today. It’s been a long time since that’s happened. And it was a real, all the way across rainbow backed with smudged grey clouds and a half hidden sun. How picturesque.
When I was small, it was always raining. We didn’t live in a god-forsaken desert then either, though. Rainbows were still pretty rare. If it was raining, it was usually pouring. There was none of this raining but the sun’s out bullshit. Oh no. The gloomy sky glared down on half my childhood. The sun steamed its way through the humid haze of the other half.
Back then, rainbows were magic. The sky was striped in translucent colors! My head was filled with visions of delicate Fae flitting around this wonderful thing. Blatantly stereotypical leprechauns smiled down on them, silly green hats and all.
I wanted to find the end. And why shouldn’t I? What self-respecting child didn’t want to be the one to discover the pot of gold, or the Little People and their wish granting? I would run all over the park, commandeering my little sister into the hunt too. I would go this way, she that. We would run as far as we could, but too soon Mom would call us back. Or the clouds would fade. Or we would lose sight of the guiding stripes.
Now, years later, I know that rainbows are just reflections of light through the prisms of the water in the clouds. Actually, with my mother’s obsession with science, I knew that then too. I just didn’t know what it meant. There is no treasure at the end of the rainbow. There isn’t even really an end to the rainbow. You can search all you like, but you will never find anything. Ever. There is nothing to be found.
I am beginning to think that everything is so. The carrot dangling in front of our noses keeps us moving, even though we know, deep down in our hearts, that we will never have it. The light at the end of the tunnel is truly just a tunnel light, a moment of relief from the darkness, but hardly an end.
Maybe, just maybe, the miracle of science that is a rainbow should be enough. Maybe cynicism is the defense of mediocre minds from their own inability to accept the hope of the light as the gift it is. But it would be nice, just once, to have slid down a rainbow.
