Through and through, life presents itself to be a remarkably thematic device. With terrific resolve, the great obscure construct of this world beholds the pathetic frame of each sad individual with a clandestine enmity, and draws its horrible designs against those hapless human figures that have the misfortune to imagine a future of happiness.
Inevitably, each discovers, to his own personal despair, that the incessant endeavor for individual survival, the great, dark irony of human nature, is a frantic and dire floundering to find some fantastic bastion from the crushing salvos that this universe of perpetual suffering reigns down upon its wretched, pitiful inhabitants. It is a struggle without hope; each life ends.
Most improbably, with a heroism that is heartbreaking and sorrowfully doomed, a man has the audacity to create, from this fetid pool of a world, a thing of unparalleled beauty and sweetness; in a world of hopeless darkness, love, which defies the very bindings of the cosmos.
With an explicit knowledge of the inevitable dissolution of each individual perspective in death, a man has the audacity to create love.
I felt my fingers remember her skin, and I felt that memory flow electric from my calloused and cracked fingertips into my veins and up to my heart, where it twisted my soul.
I’ve seen how a machine can compact an automobile into a block of scrap metal. The power of a fragmented memory of love, devoid of context and conjured from the depths of the psyche without any deliberate consent, make the abilities of that machine seem ineffably insignificant.
My life began to bloom the blessed day that I first beheld her. We were children then. I recognize now that I abandoned my childhood soon after, when I began to love her.
It was love that made us whole then. We found it in a song, in an October afternoon, in old, dirty, broken buildings, and in true friendship.
Eventually, we decided to stop in at Jim's place to eat and chat with his folks and then head out for the evening, but after stuffing ourselves with spaghetti, we ended up spending most of the afternoon drinking coffee at the kitchen table, listening to Jim's dad tell traveling stories, which we loved, though we almost knew them by heart.
My Dad also loved to recount his old adventures with us. Both were gifted tale-tellers, each treasuring their memories of old adventure, laughing genuinely, lost in nostalgia.
When all this began, I was seventeen years old, at a point in my young life where I stood upon the precipice of my youth, where I would stumble gracelessly into my own identity. In the year that preceded my first encounter with her, I had met Jimmy Penn, who, I confess, was my first true friend.
When I met Jim, I was actually shocked by his immediate fondness of me. I had made plenty of friends growing up, but with Jim, there was a sweet sincerity to everything we did together. To me, he seemed to possess some daring richness of passion and thought, which he taught me to possess for myself.
“Why should I pledge my allegiance to a flag?” he said, laughing with me as we left the tiled floors of the high school and walked into the sweet bouquet of the autumn-afternoon air. Though October was nearly past, the sun was shining and a warm breeze was lazily swirling leaves and bits of trash along the thin and bumpy sidewalks that were squeezed between the street and the front yards of the sagging town houses, with paint all cracking and peeling along doorframes and shutters.
“I mean, in our first year of school, we are expected to do it. No one ever explained to us the implications of that action. It makes me sad, you know? We are made to commit to memory this oath and commit ourselves to unconditional support of our government. That blind nationalism is the reason I won’t do it. I can’t make that pledge. I’d gladly pledge allegiance to my fellow man, but how can I sleep at night if I align myself with a government that exploits him?”
I smiled and stretched out my arms and embraced the autumn and the sunshine and our laughter.
Jim and I walked over to a convenience store and he bought me a pack of cigarettes. I packed them and took one out and lit it, and we didn’t say anything for a while. Since those early days, I’ve often thought how remarkable it is that the best kinds of friends are able find themselves fulfilled in total silence, as we often were.
Comfort, security, peace, or whatever name is conditionally appropriated for that moment in which we, as individuals, are able to transition from the action of creating or acquiring happiness, and begin experiencing that feeling as a state of being, too often transpires and terminates without due acknowledgement or appreciation.
The human desire for that state of fulfillment drives individuals to take extraordinary measures in their day to day lives. Human ambition is incredibly powerful. A man will commit himself towards the acquisition of fulfillment with such tenacity and ardor that he will render himself incapable of appreciating his existence in state of being. It was love that made us whole then. We found it in a song, in an October afternoon, in old, dirty, broken buildings, and in true friendship.
Eventually, we decided to stop in at Jim's place to eat and chat with his folks and then head out for the evening, but after stuffing ourselves with spaghetti, we ended up spending most of the afternoon drinking coffee at the kitchen table, listening to Jim's dad tell traveling stories, which we loved, though we almost knew them by heart.
My Dad also loved to recount his old adventures with us. Both were gifted tale-tellers, each treasuring their memories of old adventure, laughing genuinely, lost in nostalgia.
