Saturday, May 14, 2011

Lost and Not Yet Found

I don’t write much lately. Not altogether sure why. But in times like these. When the hot breeze outside the lowlit window. Dies on the ledge before it reaches my outspread toes. When I search for meaning and pride and one unselfish desire. When there is no clock on the wall to tick down the minutes I spend idle and impotent to do anything. Anything truly useful. This is when I write for real. Not for rent or for recognition. Not for redemption or ruin. But just to right the horizon when I am awash in the world, my cabins filling with its waves and my stern making eyes with Davy Jones.

When you were a child, were you ever lost in a grocery store? Running from isle to isle of towering boxes and bottles, iron teeth of metal carts and frosty freezers full of fake food. You just slipped away from your mother to examine a box of sugar cereal and before you know it, she is gone. A bright and interesting world it is, a grocery store to a child. Canyons of treats, colors, costumes, donuts to be bitten into and boxes to be hidden in. Other children around every corner to be taken in. Misty rainstorms over the vegetable counters to be danced in. But now, now you have strayed from your mothership. The isles seem higher and even less interested in you than inanimate objects could have been before. Carts don’t see you and run over your toes. You can’t reach the best and brightest things on the shelf from your measly height. The rainstorms leave you damp and cold. The other mothers are too busy buying with their own children to want to be yours. Suddenly you feel as if the dog food healthy cereal you have at home would do just fine for the rest of your life if you could only find the one who gives it to you in the morning. The only option now is crying and waiting for someone to notice you to take you to the customer service counter and mispronounce your name over the loudspeaker. You are a big, bad, brave six year old. A million miles from land and blubbering like a baby.

It seems you are never too old for this feeling. Never too brave or brazen. Captain of your ship on the sea of your life, there are sweltering dolldrums, triton storms, smash-rock shores or days of cabin fever, that will bring you to the brink once you seek them out. A mutinous wind is blowing and sending you so far off course that you wonder what you set off looking for in the first place. The world is a jungle and maybe you just can’t handle it. Are ‘helping people’ or ‘making a difference’ relative terms? What did you really mean by them? You thought you could fix the pain of the world? Who did you think you were anyway? Maybe you should just go back to your palace in your half-blind country and chalk it up to naivete. You spent most your life getting here and maybe you’ll spending the rest of your life back at home learning to live with yourself for being born. Spread eagle on the bed, sweating all the experiences and feelings and wonderings and loneliness and paradoxes of the last few months, heck the last 26 years, out of every pore. There is no loudspeaker. Sometimes your name doesn’t sound like yours. Even when you see its every wart, your home cart, your home country, your mother, feel very far away. How long can you stay wandering among the isles before you notice how lost you are?

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