"Who the hell can see forever?"
-"The Trapeze Swinger" by Iron & Wine

Like a woman standing at the stern of a boat, curls coming unpinned, sweat and soot from the smokestacks tracing the contours of her face. Safe with both feet on the wooden deck but cherishing that feeling of weightlessness, the sense that with one foot forward she'd be pitched into the sea, disintegrating into waves and faith.

It's not a scary thought, as she feared it would be. Instead she feels the wind bat at her dress, lifting and contorting the fabric, and with her eyes trained on that flat line where the ocean meets the sky, she laughs until tears pool in the corners of her eyes. "I can see forever!" And she lets herself scream, not muted but open, like she can't remember doing ever before, as loud as the ocean deserves. It is that large, that overwhelming.

But she can't see forever. Beyond that momentary horizon the world sprawls for thousands of miles more. Already the ship has moved forward enough to expose more of that vast distance; she only fails to notice it because it is identical to that last stretch of sea, gray and rippled like a sheet thrown to the floor or blown on a clothesline behind her, old horizons are being swallowed over the curved edge of the earth, tumbling down to wherever the past goes when there is no one to remember it.

Even some god in the sky could not see forever, because the planet is round, a half always hidden in shadow no matter how many times you turn it. And at the edges of everything, where the universe never stops expanding, pushing out, there is no light because light can't get there fast enough. Once the light gets there, that place is no longer the edge. So imagine a god frowning into the dark, squinting, shaking his flashlight, stumbling forward as down a dark hallway.

Who the hell can see forever? Not him, or you, or a woman who stands laughing on the stern of a ship, her heart so full of breath and light that it almost forgets how to beat. If an ocean and a clear sky can do that to her, imagine what forever could accomplish. No one is ready.

But that's only sight taken literally. It could be like the psychic who looks into her spun sphere of glass and tells you your future, throwing in a few ordeals of your past, as if to show she can look down both directions of the timeline. You've heard "hindsight is 20/20", though it's not; you've heard of girls hovering over Ouija boards at slumber parties asking who they will marry and if the number of flecks on their fingernails really means how many boys are thinking of them.

So maybe our inability to predict the future is the real frustration, because what conflicts would we have left if that were possible? Every moment we make decisions. If we could see their outcome beforehand we could stop every battle before its start, before the messages of war are even drafted, sent in courier planes so much faster than Hermes could ever fly.

If we could see forever, past the barely curved line of the horizon and into the dark, down the thin edge of time and all its forked potentials, we could hold paradise- small and tangible as a child's toy in your hand. The view would kill us, of course, our insides shot through so fast that all we could think is how beautiful, that light, how staggering, how whole, before we were swallowed up by the brightness.

Who the hell can see forever? Don't ask for that. This kind of blindness is a mercy.