There are some days…
… A man wakes up and asks himself, ‘What am I doing with my life?’, and then, ‘Where am I headed?’ to which he might add ‘Can I see that far ahead?’, and to which he might add the corollary, ‘Is there any way to see, to know, what is coming?’ The unspoken premise here is that life somehow follows a thread, begun in the earliest days of infancy, a theme repeated again and again, through toddlerhood, adolescence, to the moment he makes his first kiss, his first job, his first meltdown… And the list goes on and on, meandering into paths that one might normally not consider— but which may hold some unspeakable, private truth to the person. This thread is often forgotten, buried under mounds of issues, deliberately or otherwise; and just as one may try, with all his strength, to turn away from the path this thread might make for him, so too, is the ease with which it rises up from beneath these mounds and strangles one into wakefulness.
This morning I woke up from a blessed dream that seemed a lifetime— a dream of idyll and gentle, flaming sunsets, the promise and good cheer of a comfortable life, seen to its final, peaceful conclusion of a happy and graceful death. There were children—plenty of them, all laughing and jumping and climbing on trees and rolling on the soft grass with the pups. And there was a father— myself— but is it really? I never did see his face, but the children called to him, and I can’t help but imagine that father to be me.
And then I woke up, inexplicably and most unfortunately, and the clock read, “4.34am”, on the 26th of March, in the year of Our Lord 2013.
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