“Don’t know how I feel about it yet,” he said as he replaced the spark plugs.
“But you’re excited, right?”
He kept working on the plugs, giving himself time to find a careful answer.
“I just don’t know if I’m ready to be a dad yet.”
Back to the plugs.
I wanted to reassure him that everyone goes through that and she would change his world. But I didn’t know that. Maybe he was onto something.
Grandpa is denying the dynamism of history. He feels his version of the truth (a past full of heavily qualified realities and stunning mirages) is slipping away, and the “others” are creating unnatural, foreign things. Grandpa is deploring them, hiding and running from them. He is afraid because his theories on what was, is, and will be are not selling anymore; they’re not even being considered. He refuses this change, all of it.
The surest way to submit yourself to the choking darkness that has no proportion or purpose is by comparing your privilege to that of others. You will always find a better. The surest way to lift yourself from those dark depths is by comparing your pain to that of others. You will always find a heavier cross on a back more bruised than yours, and in that moment, you will also find your blessings.
He shook the ATM as if pleading that it change its mind. He bowed his head, swallowed a sob, and started shuffling over to the store. His coins were noisy. By his fourth step he heard an electronic jarring as the ATM started vomiting cash on the ground, so he fell to his knees to scoop it up. A snickering gust pulled all monies away from him and into the expanding air, and he just stayed there, kneeling in surrender.
The days blend in, and they wonder which are worth remembering tomorrow. Life seems like an endless and simmering sea. Their muscles have a richer memory than their heart, and so they float.
Then, there’s a torrent and they tumble. Your skin prickles and your vision gets sharp, for Mortality, that which we know but never accept, hugs your shoulder and tells you that someone you love will soon die. That sea was actually the edge of their waterfall.
A brash and beautiful woman made the viejita feel like the only person on that train. The viejita grew in front of all of us, like a back porch flower being caressed with care. This woman did this to a stranger, and I ached.
At home I found my wife in her usual spot, limp in front of the television as she hollered, “Dinner’s on the counter.” I stared outside wondering if this was my back porch.
Maybe he’s tired: of arguing both sides at once; of everyone else’s frantic expectations and pace. Maybe he’s depressed: with how little his long nights have changed his world; with the blood on his hands–or that he gets a kick from that power. Maybe he’s actually done and like Cincinnatus just wants to go home. He’s only a man in a tough as nails job. But he should’ve let his employer know. Now we are stuck with that or that guy.
We gotta look up. Up there, that’s the best view: harrowingly empty and crystalline, the perfect place to find Truth. Down here we’re all bumping into each other wondering what it’s like to be a valuable human being. We get stuck in muck, drowned in shit, or deep in fog. All that friction, all that meandering. It’s exhausting. So we bind together through song, and murmur to the sky and believe It knows Truth because It must know…right?
He made himself as comfortable as possible inside that squat warehouse, a can with its lid pulled back and surrounded by echoes and dins. He opened and closed boxes, addressed their content, and finished small tasks no one goes to college for. But my dad was at work, and working for himself. No one would give him a paycheck, but we still needed our food tomorrow, and he never forgot this key so-what. That’s why that warehouse meant more.
“I wish we met later in life,” she said as she hugged my torso in her college sweats. Was that a flag of surrender or a rallying cry? It took me a long time to figure that out.
She’s someone’s woman, and I’m someone’s man now. We all have laughter wrinkles and tight smiles. It’s ‘later.’ And when I look at her I remember how much time has passed and how the embers still kindle, faintly, but still.
jayrzee 