The Pilgrim By: Mariana K.That's how life is... that's life! It raises you up, it knocks you down, but you go ahead by continuously wiping the dust off your hands, now scratching a knee, then wiping out another tear, but keep on going... you start it over and over again, whenever necessary, since the minutes elapsed cannot be turned back, nor redeemed, though you can make them count. You leave behind the days when you only dreamed your life, but you did not live it, the days when you have been through so many without asking for them, nor wanting things to happen, the feeling that the light would always be off and you find it hard to breathe, the time when the very self of you was just out of yourself, wandering throughout ways and winters.You turn all hardships smithereens and smoke, you invest the feelings in people and not in things, you go ahead even if still looking back, but life is ahead, it is in you and as long as you feel it, as long as you live it... come what may!Life is so beautiful and full that its hard tries no longer frighten you, ten years spent in solitude do not scare you, just to know that you are living, that you are part of the world, of the universe.Is that all it can be? Yet it is not. Life is... many more in one place, all that we laugh, what we build together, everything we love, all that gives us a sense, everything we weep at and suffer from, it means the years past and the ones that are right now and yet to come. It materializes itself in the seconds that pass through heartbeats in our breath deep inside our chest. We, ourselves, are the ones inside, the ones who live our life by clenching our fists and fall, ceaselessly hoping... consuming happiness and love, every living and feeling, to the last of its molecule and its very existence. We do not miss a thing. We never give up.