The Ramblings of an Old Man

We fell in love. That’s how it always begins, man and woman meet, their eyes facing toward heaven, and suddenly the entire world shifts beneath their feet, transporting them across seas and oceans to each other. Infidelity and fear no more because I am here, your prince from another life, your lover that you can always lean on, even if you die. Don’t forget me because moving on always turns your head behind your back, looking into my eyes. I stare into your soul and see your fears and hopes, all seeming to align with me. That single red line on a corkboard of ideas and pictures, snapshots of music, memories, and mystery, just a thread away from a discovery that could change everything.

Or nothing, if that works for you. I mean, this is your world, your power at the tips of your fingers, light magic dancing on the precipice of greatness yet succumbing to unintelligible cowardice. It’s not your fault. Every action has an end, and some ends have new beginnings. It all takes one step and sometimes that one step is a little too far or wide or big or just too extreme for a certain moment. Sometimes you need to sit on the steps of the stairs you climb, the sharp nails puncturing your skin, the shards of wood directing you in a direction of an epiphany. A discovery or truth or falsity that somehow changes your life, makes you continue up the stairs with the memory of what you left behind. That is what I am facing. That is my reality.

As an old man, I am prone to may deniable opinions. I like what I want and I want what I like because life has taken a toll on a hard earned soul when it used to be so happy. Light, like air beneath wings of gold, shining in the summer sun. I used to fly, high in the sky, with the feeling of falling just a step away. I felt free, with each blade in my control and the predictable wind didn’t betray me. But a feather fell and the wind calmed down, causing my light to fall into the recesses of the earth. Pain is what followed, crouching on the hard, black soil, with my hands running across every rock, crevice, and center on the ground. I created art, circles, lines, triangles, squares, single connections that could explain the possibility of what happened to me. What was happening to me, and put into perspective the amount of trouble I was truly in. Never cursed or hexed, just forsaken. I was forgotten.

In that cold, dark earth, with the connections extending beyond myself, I couldn't truly find a reason. There was no sense in the nonsense of emotion that drove me to connect one section to another, one line to a shape, somehow creating some picture from a string of nothingness. And I stayed there, collecting nature along my skin and trying to keep my mind alive as my dignity and humanity melted away from my body. The freedom I had felt before was gone, and the bones it left behind made the skin I am today.

I remember a song I had loved from before. It left the listener feeling restless and hopeful, trying and tired. Its melancholic hymn swayed from side to side, just to switch into the chorus, with a total rock outro. This change put me, and every other regular fool, under its spell of belief, that this song can make you turn your life around, that the dead will become alive again, and the hateful will become the best people in the world. With just a little magic, and some effort, you too can change the world. Oh how wrong I was.

After all that was said and done, she was still dead, and I was the lonely fool still in love with a ghost that had left me here to rot. I was still here and every scream and shout would never be able to contact her spirit. I could never see her again, tell her how much I loved her, how much she would hate being here, and how much I despised her for leaving me here. She was my best friend, my confidant, my wind in my wings, the breath in my life, my being to my body. She was there, when everyone else seemed to leave.

It's so weird how people try to comfort you after someone you know died. They can only awkwardly repeat the same lines over and over again, like they were rehearsing for a school play and when they finally got onto that stage, they froze up. They place a hand on your shoulder or give you a light hug, and all you can do is smile and say thank you because, despite their insignificance in your world, they still put in the effort to say "Thank you for all the memories. Now, I'll leave you to pick up the pieces." The next day, when all the food was gone and the black clothes were burned, I was left all alone, in a big house, by myself. It felt like everything inside was the same. The furniture was the same, the paintings were the same, the dust that hung from every corner of the ceiling was the same. I sat in the same chair I had sat in every day before, wearing the same comfortable clothes I had worn before, simply waiting, gazing to the stairs, waiting for you to come down. My memory wasn't what it used to be, so I waited all day, but you never came down. You never looked up to see my face, and simply smile. You never said a joke I never quite understood but I laughed at it anyway. You never hugged me so tight that I seemed breathless for a second, and you never kissed me on the cheek before I went to sleep at night. I was just there, waiting like every day before, for you and your presence, to never come.