We go to classes. We concentrate. We drift away on pleasant thought clouds or bothersome thought storms or thoughtful thoughts like these:
“Why do those that we once knew now ignore our existence? We see them, greet them at least with smiling eyes, if not a gesture of kinetic force or some sort of sound escaping from our lips or vocal cages like bright yellow canaries. The light that once would have ventured out from our soul to brighten their lantern of recognition has now become a dark cave of cold collected coolness: their treehouses take in no more fireflies, and all you can do is feel the awkward wave as a slowly undulating force pass by your core as you realize that they are now walking with one less face in their menagerie of friendship.”
And then we laugh! Something he said, that man, there, in front of the classroom, sometimes standing, sometimes sitting, but more often than not he is writing strange symbols on a board too blurred to actually be a real stationary color. What was it that he said? What makes anything funny? They catch us all off guard: something rhymes, someone’s “untarnished” name has been put to shame, an awkward silence is broken; the laughter marks a mere token of words unsaid.
So what was I talking about? Oh, yes. Surviving: the plot. We are all searching for some overarching plot, some road that will take us to the exciting climax so we can rest on the denouement. So many up and down situations become the hills of happiness and the valleys of sadness; life is never a straight line. Well, straight lines lead to straight lines on medical monitors. The shrill tone says “He died on a Friday morning at precisely 5:37.” It says “He was done and the drive to survive drove away with his girlfriend of seven years. She never asked him about the source of his tears.”
Stories. So obsessed with stories are we the people of the threatening flat line. We thirst for modulation, so much so that even if we are crying on the last page or in the last 37 seconds of the movie, then we are happy in some small place within ourselves: a wicker house made of thicker things like tree branches and dandelion strings. Soap operas become grand examples of melodrama so laughable yet so addicting to so many housewives, lonely spinsters, and young girls longing for the line to shift, to change, to become a rollercoaster of ups and downs surrounded with the “yes” and “no”, speeding chases down street-lit nights and halting stops. Next to garbage trucks. In the high noon as the world buries, her, dead.
Dead roses in the cracked glass water bowl.
Some get angry when I mention this because they say I’m being somber. I’m just putting into words what is there just as much as the person viewing vibrant violets would comment about their “violet vibrance”. Through life, the painter is given the colors with which to paint his masterworks. You ponder Van Gogh’s life. No. You don’t ponder it. I ponder Van Gogh’s life. I make you ponder it. Or rather, I wish you would ponder it. Writer’s often speak for the reader’s as if they were holding the puppet in the tangle of strings. It is quite the opposite, actually. WE ponder Van Gogh’s life: a swirling night with an inferno of stars rippling in the sky-pond and Picasso with blue hued broken guitar man with fallen hands.
I’m sitting there, staring at the woman telling me that everything happens for a reason, that I have to take my ups with my downs, that we are the sum of everything that has happened to us. I look at the paintbrush clasped tightly in my hand and at the paint precariously plummeting azure planets on a celestial floor.
Is the pain worth the gain?
Is the brokenness worth the building of something whole?
Are the years of bitter silence worth the moment of merry music?
I think that it is worth it
No comments:
Post a Comment