ENTROPY ARROW
Eros has his arrow. Mathematics its vector. Psychology its intention.
With force and direction, all of them straight lines of determination.
Entropy joins them, swift and forward in time in one direction only.
Something is said, a deed is done, a state change inevitably sets in.
What was said can’t be taken back. The thing done cannot un-happen.
What was is now no longer, the broken never to be mended as it was.
Nothing can be reversed. It’s time’s gift and time’s curse.
So many questions are moot, their answers muted by the strike of the arrow.
How do you get the feeling back again?
How does betrayal set itself right?
How do you un-hear what was heard?
When will the memory transform and no longer sting?
How does the broken heart find its original wholeness?
When will the sands of time shift back to where they once were on the shore?
When will the clouds reform the shapes they had only yesterday?
The hopeful trope claims healing comes with time, never mind the scars.
Metaphors of Kintsugi promise being better than new with inlaid gold,
but in truth the jagged lines of repair fool no one into forgetting
the places where the arrow of entropy struck.
Such attempts only highlight the extent people will go
to try to recover from the thing that can’t be undone.
But the attempt only proves the strength of entropy’s arrow.
Not willing to accept the vector of its force,
mental contortions and emotional tangles ensue.
Stoic smiles and ongoing practices of letting go abound,
all of it added layers of patchwork, stippling our souls with
thousands of paper cut patterns of tearful wear.
Fate plays the trickster and twists our pain with irony,
rubbing our faces into stinging synchronicities,
echoing our losses with pathos and bête noire humor.
Our passions find Eros, when turned backward upon us, becomes Sore.
Even the straight and narrow eludes us for math vectors
in the presence of the gravity of our situation only travel
in curved lines through non-Euclidean personal spacetime.
And shadow work unveils our intentions are mostly unconscious,
driven as much by instinct and drives and trauma as willful purpose.
As final insult we are left bereft, never sure if what we think we lost
was ever really ours at all, or was it just our charade
of ego, projection, and wishful illusion? If so, then we are the punchline
of the saddest joke of all, played on ourselves by ourselves
in a field of mirages where we spent our impassioned past
chained to phantoms beguiling us with what we wanted to find,
not at all with what was really there.
Is there an easy way back to where we were, to the way it was?
Why speak of easy, for there is no way back at all.
The only thing left for us we’re told is acceptance. We must accept.
Accept the loss of what was. Accept how you can’t go back.
Accept the impact of entropy’s arrow. And accept it has changed you.
But more importantly, you must determine in your heart,
and you cannot lie to yourself, for you will know your lie
and it will chase you in circles until you’re mad,
you must determine in your heart one thing only –
now that you are the way you are, now that you’re left with what remains,
answer truthfully – are you more because of it – or are you less?
How this question is answered determines the fine line,
the essential phase state going forward,
the vital distinction between peace and torment.
Resist answering, and your life becomes a scalar,
a vector of magnitude only with no direction.
Either way, you’re impaled on entropy’s arrow.
