Everyone's Destiny

Everything Is (Finally) Illuminated

As I finished Everything Is Illuminated for the fourth time, I  became illumined yet again.  Sitting at the beach I placed the book in my lap and watched the evening waves roll and crash.  The roar and tumble of each wave, their perpetuity, cleared my mind. 

I thought about all that has happened to bring me to this point in my life, as I am.  Not just the events in my life, but also my mother's life, my father's, my brother's, my grandfather's, friends', neighbors', strangers'.  I thought about all of them, everyone, before me and after me, and its impossible to think any of it is meaningless.  This is not simply to say that there is an explanation for everything I've thought, said, and done - that there is/are an explanation(s) for the way/who I am.  Just as it is not simply an explanation for everything I've not thought, not said, and not done.  All that has occurred to make me who I am has been done so that I exist for the memory.  I do not exist to keep the memory alive.  I exist because the memory keeps me alive.

While I have searched my own life for these explanations, for the reasons why I write better than I speak; take comfort in solitude; wait to be questioned before I reveal, I realized that the answers are unknowable - they do not exist anymore.   All that remains is me - the accumulation of past and future, of memory and remembrance, of truth and exaggeration, of hope and faith, of belief and the forgotten.

The realization is heavy.  It carries responsibility.  It fills me with the duty to live out each memory, whether I remember it or not, as proudly as I can.  The memory of the event, any event throughout the course of time, the birth of my father or the fall of Rome, is buried within me.  To ignore it or deny the memory's presence, regardless if I remember it, is to deny the event's existence and my own.  This realization brings responsibility, but with responsibility comes purpose.

Phew, for a minute there I lost myself...

In a deep, deep sleep
Of the innocent
I am born again

I stepped off the plane, and the terminal was crowded.  This, back in the days when you could still greet people at the gate, back in the days before fear and caution ruled the land.  One by one we each returned to our worlds, almost not realizing that they had continued while we were gone.  I scanned the crowd but could not find mine.  Full families were there; brothers, sisters, cousins, grandparents; some with signs and balloons.  You'd have thought we had just returned from a mission of national liberation, but our trip had been much different.  Rather than fighting to guard and protect a system of beliefs and values - the status quo, we let go of all our previous notions of what we had believed to be true and sacred.  Not because we wanted to, but because there was no other option.
    I kept looking for my family, getting nudged through the gate area by butts and elbows as the others were getting showered with hugs, handshakes, and high fives.  I stood off to the side already feeling overwhelmed, backing myself into a corner, cowering.  I shook my head and tears welled up in my eyes.  I wanted to retreat, to go backwards, rewind, go back.  It was too late.  As I turned to leave this ever discomforting scene behind, my own world came crashing back to me.  My mother crying and my father with a look a disbelief.  My hair not cut in over a month, more tan that an Irishman has ever been, six stitches behind my ear, and thirty pounds lighter.

I'm amazed that I survived.

In the days and weeks that followed, as my appearance returned to normal, my eyesight did not.  I could see perfectly fine, but nothing looked the same.  And it wasn't just my eyes that were giving me trouble.  Everything tasted bitter or bland, smells barely registered a memory, and my sense of touch was gone.  I could not feel, or maybe I felt too much.  Whatever it was sent my body into a state shock.  It shut down and couldn't function.

Please, could you stop the noise.  I'm trying to get some rest.

I spent hours in my room day and night staring at the clock, and I cried.  I cried because their world would never change, and the memory of what took place at any minute of the day would be forever etched into my memory.  6:47am - roosters crowed in the yard with the gentle scraping of a broom dusting off the stones and concrete.  The smell of fresh coffee.  3:12pm - Bodies, sprawled out on the concrete floor, gathered in front of the fan.  No one moved.  A radio softly played.  Heat billowed down from the tin roof.   Flies buzzed in the kitchen.  Outside, animals gathered in the shade.  9:27pm – The family gathered on the porch to share with each other in silence or with stories told.  In the distance a silence echoed only recognizable to a foreigner.  No echo of a far off freeway, no clamor from the television, no blare from the radio.  Only the buzz of a mosquito in your ear or crickets talking back and forth in rhyme.  The immensity of the silence was humbling and the blanket of stars let you know how small you are.
    Minute by minute, hour by hour I shut myself off from the world I had returned to.  Day by day, week by week I decided that I wanted none of it, longing simply to return to a world where only what was necessary was needed.

Rain down
Come on rain down
On me
From a great height

(to be continued?)

...

I have been so infrequent and inconsistent with my writing that I know whatever audience I had is gone.  This is now only for me and thats what I want it to be.  I'll be pleased if my readership has vanished because my writing sucks these days.  Aimless, uninspired, and without purpose.  My words have become trite, vocabulary diminished, and without sense of style.
    Where has all that I have had to say gone?  Going in and out of environments of solitude, my voice was left unused to collect inside my head.  My outlet became pen and paper, keyboard and screen.  I could write for hours, cherishing my choice of words.  I'd save every scrap and fragment, rereading them all hundreds of times to unconsciously piece them together.  My favorites were the ones written in the middle of the night, rolling over in bed to scrawl a fragment of my dream on a note card, cryptic, then returning to the realm sleep.  I'd wake up without recollection of my thoughtdreams, astonished at what had occurred in my sleep.  "...rewards handed out in units of bravery..."  "...we were living on the 71st floor of an apartment building towering out of the water..."  "...all junkied up and Courtney made eggs..."  Even saved emails bring me a sense of disbelief when rereading what I had written.  Now my electronic communication has become vacuous, focused on the content of the message, delivered has undramatically as possible. 
    Having burrowed out of seclusion, words bubble out of my mouth daily, incessantly.  But the words are different, for a different audience and purpose, and when those days and times return when I attempt to pry open my mind and let the jumbled mess unfurl itself on the page, I find nothing.  Has the fountain of creativity dried up inside me?  Have I become to far removed from the experiences in my life that have most inspired me, filling me with awe and wonder, confusion and question?  I hope not.  For once I'll refuse the plate of pessimism served with a side order of fatalistic tendencies.  At least for today, I'll still dream of being a writer.