I was told to write something happy...funny...one of the last things I wrote was called Happy: I never realized how dark it gets up in those mountains having grown accustomed to in spending the formative years of my existence ambling through that dark. Now the summers, don’t get me wrong, the summers have a glow about them that I have chronicled in these annals before but the winters - damn man – the winters are what now register so dark in my memories. And I cannot sleep tonight. This, the reason why the pen draws crooked on the page, as I write atop the ice box wondering where the last year has gone. The doctor has informed me I will never be happy since I have set such high expectations for myself in this life, and never being able to capture a feat rewarding enough to satisfy my desire for success I keep chasing, valiantly, errantly. Forever I am chasing. Forever I am doomed to unhappily chase – “Unless,” he adds, “you attain more realistic and plausible outcomes and goals for your life.” Which sure as hell sounded like: “Settle for mediocrity” to me. Which is everything I never wanted to me. Ah, and now burns a light through the darkness on the Catch 22 that my life is. Someday, in the unlikely event that an angel finds my dwellings and irresponsible dreams for something better tolerable enough, I may find the joy in a son all my friends say they have found in their own offspring. When he is old enough to comprehend, I will ask him that classic question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The answer I hope is not ‘doctor’ nor ‘lawyer’, not ‘pilot’, ‘proffer’ or ‘priest’, not ‘scholar’, not ‘stock broker’, not ‘school teacher’. I hope he simply answers my query with one word, “happy,” as this is only thing anyone should hope to be when they reach that grand illusion of “Grown Up”. It is so dark back in those mountains, in the winter, where nary a light is seen and the wind blows cold over the hardened crust of the snow, picking up the loose flakes thrashing them through the briars, before pelting them onto your face. The world lives on the hope that spring is perennial, but there is no light to guide me there, no lights to illuminate my path in the perpetual pursuit of the happiness that he told me to achieve for myself. So I’ll wrap the jacket tight, and set off alone into the darkness, in the laborious quest of a place somewhere between “Grown Up” and “Happy” relying on nothing more than blind faith in the night while waiting for the train to come.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 03:02:07 +0000
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