His time would come. The words would come—the right ones. There was something the universe had yet to teach him—something he had yet to learn. A challenge. No, an opportunity. A different way of looking at things. A more sober way of looking at things. The truth. There is only one truth, and he’d be so lucky if he found it. Not many do. People think they have a good grasp on the truth. But, in most cases, they have a good grasp on an opinion – an opinion they were predisposed by environment or circumstance to hold.
Politics is a sport of ego and manipulation, a vehicle for division and dehumanization and bloodletting, a killer of consciousness. Religion is a better system than politics, but sometimes not by much. The ancient scriptures from West and East are good enough. But it’s as simple as practice what you preach. And how many people can say in good faith that they do this? He goes to service every Sunday, but while he’s there he’s fantasizing about jumping Randy’s daughter who’s back from college and wearing that tantalizing Easter dress. Then he gets in the car and curses a fellow churchgoer for cutting him off on the same grounds they were just worshiping on. Then he and everyone else in the car get back to their gossiping and their judging and their dismissing of others. And this is saying nothing of the Catholic Church itself, covering for all those pedos, who, through their twisted animalistic acts, put in motion an incomparable suffering that will perpetuate in any number of dysfunctional forms, overt and subtle, from generation to generation. “Unconscious of their unconsciousness they make possible the unconscionable,” a wise man once said.
He hadn’t been singular—And really, if singularity wasn’t the goal, then what was? —all those days he said she wasn’t playing her part. In retrospect, he was just projecting because he felt like he wasn’t playing his part by quitting his job to go off and do something as vague as write. He knew, and she knew, it was the right thing. Sometimes, she knew more than he. Because she understood his potential more than he, because she wasn’t biased by the same programming. He’d been hardwired by environment and selves’ past (were they really in the rearview?) to think that nothing he did was good enough.
Even as he was strongly suggesting that she too wasn’t good enough, she had faith in him. Even though his words sometimes stung, and her eyes sometimes welled up after she’d closed the bedroom door, she still had faith in him.
She never reciprocated such hurtful words because if there was one thing she had, it was faith in him. She was a woman who knew her worth just as much as she knew his. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of stooping to his level, which she knew was just a fleeting moment of unconsciousness, not a marker of who he really was. She wasn’t two-faced like the weak man in the church pew. She was the lone streetlamp that stayed bright during the power outage.
And he would inevitably snap out of his stuff in the face of her light, resilient and bright, unwavering as ever in its power and strength.
I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. It’s about me.
I know.
That was ugly.
I have faith my time will come. You need to have faith that yours will too.
Hers did. And he wept tears of joy thinking about her flapping her wings when she left and he stayed, alone at home behind the computer, realizing that all his pet projects were just big distractions from his fears, meaning he’d taken detours, meaning he hadn’t arrived, meaning he hadn’t returned. She was now standing up in front of three hundred people delivering rousing speeches. He could never do that. And he was filled not with jealousy, but awe. Awe at how someone so tender can also be so commanding, now a lighthouse in a sea of people, who were beneficiaries of her wisdom without even knowing it.
She inspired him to redouble his efforts to find that forgotten path. And he began to keep the faith, like her, that one day it would make itself known to him. It would come when he learned to quit stroking his ego or trying to prove himself, which, as he would discover, were one in the same. It would come, paradoxically, with little effort. It wouldn’t be laborious or torturous. He wouldn’t have to fight it the whole way.
He’d know he was getting close when he started notching consecutive days behind the computer where he barely looked up from the keyboard to breathe. Days in which he’d forgotten to eat, where three hours turned to twelve, and what finally made him come to was a stomach that was aching so loudly he couldn’t tune it out anymore. Days where he’d feel a sharpness like no other in his calves from hours of euphoric tension and excited tapping. Days where she’d come home and comment that it looked like a tornado had rolled through his office, frantic scribblings that were only intelligible to him laid out on sticky notes and napkins and that wedding invite they’d forgotten to RSVP to on the floor.
And he’d be at peace when it was all typed and done and he’d articulated everything that was in his soul that day. And because it came from there, and not some ‘higher intellectual’ place, it was pure, meaning it was true, so he’d never have to consult the internal mob and fret over whether he ought to go back and make edits to such and such section. The stars had aligned in space and time, and his consciousness aligned right there with them. And he cast his own light on the page, knowing that there was a good chance that his reader might come away with something of substance too.
And one night he’d look at the night sky and know that, while he hadn’t arrived, because where’s the fun in arriving in your twenties, he was finally back on the right trajectory – the same trajectory that quiet little boy who spent hours on hours alone in the backyard talking to dead people and playing out grand scenarios in imagined worlds was on. And he would be flooded with gratitude for having had the opportunity to exit space and time to get the train back on track. And he’d realize that his wings were flapping the whole time, as hers. The only difference being that now the wings were dry, not wet, and so able to flap faster and stronger and more gracefully.
And suddenly a firework that was either real or imagined—he would never care to clarify which—would appear in that night sky, and a single tear would stream down his face, this one for him.
Tears in my eyes - beautiful, the truth and able to help make you and others see the as you said “the truth”….:-)
Mindful & thought-provoking piece