rainbow

Sometimes, the sun breaks.

I watched the capital drown. I watched the floodgates shatter, and the ocean rush in, and from a clear blue sky a storm arose, blackening the sky and making a quiet morning into a tempest. I watched, in one terrible instant, the moment the old world fell. And I stood there, overlooking the city, watching, because what else could I do? What could anyone do? The wind and the rain and the thunder drowned out the sounds of everyone still in that city crying out in terror as the ocean at last reclaimed her own.

Then the storm began to diminish and retreat inland, and the ocean began to calm, and there, behind that bone-white spire that now jutted out of the ocean like a gravestone, was a rainbow. At the time I felt nothing: not the rain that had soaked through my clothes, not awe at the beauty of the rainbow, not horror at the calamity I'd just witnessed. I was too numb for any of that. But later, when I was more myself, when I was able to weep, I considered the rainbow.

It has always been a sign of hope, a beautiful thing that follows the rain; the more religious among us see it as a promise from whatever divine or spiritual entities they believe controls the weather; I am not so fortunate as to have such beliefs, but the narrative is compelling, isn't it? At the end of a disaster that I still have yet to fully fathom, there is a promise, that at least there is something bright in the future.

But my mind refuses to accept that comfort for long--did we buy this bright future at the cost of the present? Can such a purchase ever merit such a terrible cost? Or perhaps this really is the start of a brighter future, perhaps the world that springs up in the wake of this disaster will be a just world. Would that be worth it, if so? So many people are prepared to trade their lives just to make this world better for a few moments; would an entire city be prepared to burn so that a better world could grow from their ashes?

Is the rainbow, in short, ever worth it?