Iryna Korenovska’s Reviews > The White Book > Status Update

Standing at this border where land and water
meet, watching the seemingly endless recur-
rence of the waves (though this eternity is in
fact illusion: the earth will one day vanish,
everything will one day vanish), the fact that
our lives are no more than brief instants is felt
with unequivocal clarity. Nothing is eternal.

She'd considered living somewhere in sight
of perpetual snow. Where the bodies of trees
clustered close outside her window would mark
each shift in season against the unchanging
backdrop, off in the distance, of permanently ice-capped mountains.

Another hour went by before I shuffled out in my slippers. Snow had begun to scatter down. Outside, the alley had darkened; the streetlights were not yet on. Paint can in one hand, brush in the other, I stood unmoving, a dumb witness to the snowflakes’ slow descent, like hundreds of feathers feathering down.

Each moment is a leap forward from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way.