ex-child

If you turn off the radio, silence the screaming faces flashing on the television, close your eyes until all goes black and think, you can remember the moment; that time in your life when everything made sense, when your body and spirit rested upon the mad pulse of a life teeming with wild anticipation and possibility. You were young, just a child, and your untamed eyes saw life as an open field with no fences, rolling hills and flowing streams pristine.

You wanted to be a baseball player. A fireman. An astronaut. Not even the sky would limit your fascinations, your aspirations. Your life wasn't lived through the jaded prism of some bitter man's philosophy. You remember: you would snicker at the cynics and disregard the pessimists, and you vowed to yourself and your ideals that you would never become the man you buried in November of 1997 (your gravestone shall share his last name).

But as you sit alone in the corner booth of some seedy bar drinking cheap whisky and smoking stale cigarettes, you catch yourself. Your eyes are sinking in the most loathsome of seas and you are watching a couple – a young couple drunk and in love – laugh about some meaningless anecdote. It's nothing, really, just a laugh about some mishap in Chicago, but their laughter is pulverizing your sense of identity into the swollen wooden floor under your feet, and if you strain your eyes and strain the sickening laughter and empty jukebox music from your ears, you can see particles, atoms, the essence of your being dissipate, up, up, and away, through the beams bracing this bar, this structure, specks and spots, fragments of your being dissolve, up, up, and away, through the ceiling and into the night sky until they become….

You used to laugh. You once had a woman on your arm. And you can recall enjoying the bite of whisky on your tongue.

But you don't laugh anymore. The pretty woman is gone. And now, you can't swallow the liquor quickly enough.

"Another whisky?" the young barmaid asks.

You gaze ahead. The loathsome sea is rolling, swallowing your brown eyes, and you struggle to stay afloat and wash the wretched ambience of the bar from your senses, and the barmaid, she could be a million miles offshore; you wave her off as a grunt crawls from your belly.

You collect your coat and head for the door. A cold drizzle is slowly rolling out of the sky and you can hear the nearby interstate churning with traffic.

A cold bed awaits you, and soon you will be there, alone and in all that darkness. You will stare at the strange stain on your ceiling and, inevitably, you will recall a certain time in your life – a moment when you saw rolling hills and open fields; a time when everything made sense because you failed to understand the mechanisms of modern life. And you will think about the world outside your bedroom: the traffic streaming across America's highways; a young couple exploring each other's bodies for the first time; a barmaid retiring to the waiting arms of her boyfriend; and a winter's mist glazing your father's neglected tombstone.

Indeed, you know what awaits you tonight.

So drive home. Turn on the radio. Ignite the faces waiting inside your television. Feed your senses the sweet opiate of distraction. Forget that you used to live in a world of logic and color. And shun the reflections, those distant memories of the boy who carried the marrow of the world inside his precious heart.

That child is now a sullen man whose blood beats black.

And things don't make sense anymore.

xx