I was lonely on a beach, but only in the third person. In my head I had achieved peace with my situation and and felt an immense calm in the world by laying motionless on the beach. Families spotted the sand but to me there was no one around. I was alone in the world and these were less people than vessels of interaction that I may or may not deal with at a point to come. Directionless, I brushed the sand from my jeans with the cursory open hand sweeps that traditionally the dust crumbs from the bed, buried my ciggerett in the beach and stared out over the expanding lake into the forest on the other side where the wine-colored afternoon played the long sustained notes of yesterday to a man who'd lost touch with the world. It was here I couldn't help but think of you...
I couldn't tell if it was sweet victory or an empathetic pain. She looked at the ground and mustered all the strength she could show that she was immersed in her work. She always was a terrible liar and someone who hadn't witnessed the altercation would have known she was on the verge of tears. It didn't matter what had happened or whether or not he was right (he was), that heat of that battle was long dead, and we all dispersed. I turned around as I walked out, incorrectly thinking I had elsewhere to be, but I'm good with eyes and I dare say I've read better stories in the eyes of strangers on a bus than I have on all the shelves in the libraries in Tuscaloosa. I was cheating this time around though, this was less narrative than the recounting of a familiar fairytale my mother might have told me when I was a kid. I was her in the recent past, an the ache that sits in the eyes of someone living with the torture, despite how you feel about them, only makes you think of the time when you felt that way. Its not hard to imagine where they imagined Johnny Blaze from.
In her head she had invited herself to the realization she always had fought against. She had drawn the ire of the man in an unnecessary quest to make people believe she was as intelligent as she thought she was and, ironically, as smart as she had appeared. She overreached and in front of the very audience she needed to impress, she failed. Moreover, she fell on her face. And weary from the rigors of life and the stress of work and all this unneeded effort, she was there on the cliffs overlooking a break down, and as if to spare herself from more embarrassment, and the action that would force her own confessions of insanity, she held it back. She chocked it in. And I can say that its here I don't know where she would go.
Forever ago, by virtue of my horrible gauge of time, I realized that all great art, imitated or invented,w as due to subtlety. And when we try as hard as we may, we're never as convincing as we'd like to be, rather we are just as truthful as we should be. Everyone trying to hard to be something is as authentically that attribute as they appear. Poorly spoken but you gather my meaning. Those dying to be viewed as intelligent, constantly spouting off the phrases and answers to questions no one asked, inviting the compliments will find themselves starved and lonely. Those who make the points they can when time permits them to do so will act with the insouciant poise that plants a complimentary view in the subconscious of others.
Somewhere along the line I had arrived at the belief that life was short and the road was long and that all things pass, they hot topic of today, if seen with all the attention one requires will become as passing as time itself. The bigger, better, now is not here for very long. The only things that people really remember is that which stands in legal precedent and fact.
"I love you"
"I don't"
Those moments, and all like it are flashes in the pan, and furthermore, are relegated to those very moments in time. Tomorrow the answers may not be the same, for each admission chances forever the open scape of reality for all those present and involved.
Somewhere out there I had my heartbroken for the second and final time. And I didn't become bitter or numb. I just became logical and realized, in some Neuromancer-like fashion, that the only kinds of people that existed were the logical and those who weren't quite there yet. I told Annie the other day that in any given relationship there needed to be a rutter and there needed to be a great and restless ocean. Its rather self explanatory, but just to make it more clear, there is someone who (and this changes from issue to issue) makes the most illogical decisions and thinks in a million directions with exception to the logical and correct one and there is someone who cuts through it all and remains rational for the good of the journey.
My advice my friend is to realize what you are, realize what you want, realize how you're moving isn't getting you there, and that, in the end its not worth the stress.
In the end I felt bad for not helping or lending my experience to the situation, but I realized that those living in the fire storm of their own self-consciousness can't be helped. They're too busy pretending it was no big deal. They're occupied making excuses for all the embarrassed them and creating new maxims that won't work either, but clearly must be the way seeing as the last set of maxims found them here in this ditch. They must find their own way, or ask for help. They must be willing in one fashion or another to understand that something isn't working and that we should unchain ourselves from our own mental slavery (as bob once put it) and realize that all the prisons we create do less to give us a personality and shape who we are, and do more to hinder that which people like about us from getting out.
I was long-winded, I know. And for this I apologize, but non-fictional life has struck me and I can't ever articulate with brevity the advice I think is priceless and will deliver you from your own...whatever.
take a deep breath folks, and realize its not really worth it all in the end...right Freddy?
"I'm easy come, easy go...Anyway the wind blows, doesn't really matter to me"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment