Aimless stuff

I

Wintertime. It's cold but the seasons have not changed drastically. I keep waiting for the beginning of winter and it's nearly closed. The book of this year is closing. It's January. The summer will be hot. The seasons will blend, the end will come like a shock. Then we will assimilate. We will return to our instincts, excessively thinking on activities.

It's changes in weather that create this kind of scrambling. I can see the fall already. After the long hot summer, it will be a time of achievement! I see people running around like chickens, creating fancy nests, whatever they can afford for the impending Winter, this coming one, this long awaited feast!

I don't really care for the weather. I am bored to death with pleasantries. That's all that has developed from this winter. The trees were full of robins today. Lovely birds, too. All of them looked fat and beautiful, even the females. They flittered up and came to rest as I was walking by. I felt as if I were at the supermarket, how the lights come on as you peruse the frozen foods section. They made my coming by such an event. But it meant hardly a thing. It isn't even close to Springtime.

It seems I spend most of my time wandering about. I have things to do, but at the end of each day I find myself cursing it as wasted. How many hours have I wasted today? Wasted time comes in all forms, even when I have accomplshed things I would have liked to have accomplished. To me, better than anything is the thing that will please someone else the most. Who will or won't approve of this moments worth? However, if it were only up to me, I would be content to wander. Not aiming at all, as I do. I don't mean to say I have no where to be. That I am not expected to work, or to perform, as we all are expected to, no, I mean to say to really wander, for once, and to end up at no place at all. I mean to say that sometimes I would rather end up no where at all.

Have you ever wondered, as a child even, whether you could just walk to the edge of the planet? And what might you find there? I wondered so much about this when I was young, but it translates. If you keep wandering and you reach the edge, perhaps the edge is only nothingness, metaphorically speaking, or maybe it is a continuum, ever changing, although still quite the same. Rounding about and coming up you would go, like the sun or moon, and around until you reach no particulars, only inexaustible moments. Moments or nothingness. I suppose it is about who cares to go anyway. Who wants to wander?

I don't know that I would survive it. I suppose it is better that I don't think from my own perspective, because who would think of such a life? I have been, in my closet, ... it's been days now, and I look at my belogings and I nearly cry. So much stuff, and it is all but meaningless. It doesn't have any real value. I cannot sell my things. I cannot use them beyond their purpose. Some are articles of clothing. Some are trinkets, some decorations. I have a bed, and things that hang on my walls as well, and even the bed, it holds me down. I make it each day, I cannot stray from this habit. I watch the television only some of the time, and some of the time, I open the windows and I hear the call of nature, where the Springtime will come, and it makes inspirational things happen.

I walked through the rooms of my home several times this week. I walked up and down the hall, one day in particular, and the light was coming in through the window of every room. It was as if there was a sudden life in me. I was joyful! I kept thinking how wonderful it had become there, how nice it was to be at home. And the next day it rained and wouldn't you know? It washed all of my joy away.

I used to enjoy the rain, but now I never sleep. I rest. I don't waste time. I don't break habits. I listen to the voices inside my head. I wander, with an aim I wander. I cast down my head, I look away from new expectations. I desire no more considerations. If it were possible, I think, I might not be expected anything of, and of course I am. So in the midst of all that I do, I realize that none of it matters to me, and it is just like any walk. If I were headed to the ends of the world or to the restroom at Bennigans, I wander.

II

Before I had time to notice, life unraveled. It was as if my permit for delving had expired, and I was called to attention. What a stubborn soldier I am. I had arrived at the moment, boots in hand, dirt on my face. I did arrive. A bit of a pity when life throws you into a frenzy. I was looking at myself with confidence and courage. I had promised myself I would be steady, even though I knew how fragile I really was. But we do that sometimes. We look at how nice it all is and we get comfortable, and we think we have arrived, but there hasn't been an arrival.

So what was expected of me? Clearly, I had to follow through on my promise to Shepard. I had made a promise and I never go back on those things. Never. Unless it is permitable, and I can override such a promise with an even greater promise. And that is what I was hoping for.

Shepard is my brother. He died a while ago. Posthumously, I asked a favor of him, and it exceeded my wildest invention. As it is, I am his whipping boy. But who can avoid such an assignment? He lost his life while saving mine. If there were thousands before me, who among them would share this debt? This was more than any one person could bear for a long time. And the promise was something recorded in time, a memory only, before I had realized what he had done.

Many might have met at the crossroads, that symbolic place where we lay down our very souls, or we arm them, full on, with every strength we can muster. I had to make a decision at some point. This was between me and Shepard. What do I do? Who would make a promise like this, who would agree it didn't even matter after it was all said and begun? Who, I wondered, would follow through, no matter what it meant?

I sometimes thought, in the depths of such a terrible despair, that no one would choose it. That it must not be equal to its promise to you. Would anyone endure, for his own brother even, something such as this? And that was the only way to make it through. But then I remember that the reason I was doing this was that I led him to that dark place, and I sat down with him there. I was the one who had coaxed him, laughed at him. Told him to relax. As he lay, taking his last breath. I denied it all. But in my heart, I screamed in agony. Oh God, why place Shepard in the midst of this? Why did I bring him here at all?

I taught you a lesson once. A long time ago. It was the thought of the moment, a shot in the dark. But making such decisions, decisions to speak, decisions to entertain, I was only just becoming a teacher. They say that teaching is learning, and that a master is never to be surpassed. I doubted my role as master.I was right.

What was I? What was I? Was I the dream I had held so alive in my stomach, the man who had dared a dream once? The dream had a slow death. A slow flicker like breath across a flame. Slow and steady, but increasing, like in play. Then out.

III

(When we went to the water it was just spring and the air, though warm enough to wear our bathingsuits without covering up, was crisp still and the water was freezing cold. I remember feeling that same peace that always came to me when I stood at the edge of any water. There is something so majestic and mysterious about water. It whips and it pulls and it beckons, and the most wonderful thing was the waters had receded and left dozens of shelss that looked like old stones and i felt that I had met with the Gods of the sea. There we stood and my daughter looked out over the ocean while my son wandered off, each time returning just as we wanted to leave. I remember that I had a sense of pride about this when an old man had been standing there and witnesses my sons return, just as we stood from our crouching sand building positions and raised my hand in the direction he'd been off to.

When I think of the vacation, I am aware of how we were there as a last visit together before he left, and I am sad about it. I am sad at his coming to my hearts call. Here I will maybe find a way to write about all the things that came fom this last year and a half of my life, and hopefully it will be awesome, but for now, its important just to recall....) The writing will happen.