A Return to Hope (Captured)

How long has it been?, he asks himself silently. And he honestly doesn’t know — time has stretched and compressed and warped so much that the ten years his math tells him could be a day or a century. How long since I didn’t feel like a machine, like an emotionless computer processing 0s and 1s and not much more?

The rain blows against the window at his head, soft chit repeating at irregular intervals as the wind shifts. A cat paces back and forth at the foot of the mattress, whining quietly that his usual spot is not easily accessible. There’s the familiar whir and occasional puff of cool from the tower fan to his left. There’s a smell of clean shampoo, fruit-scented? and WONDERFUL, and the weight of her right arm across his chest, firm but light as an autumn ocean breeze. Cool, soft, alien but so familiar from his wandering daydreams. Her hand on his shoulder, touching the tattoo, her fingernails occasionally digging as she dreams of whatever beautiful aliens dream of.

The past years, he had suspected he was slipping away from himself. There were moments of his old and familiar self, but fewer and further between as the decade had progressed. Hobbies had fallen to the side, passion projects had run out of steam, and inspiration had been muted, barely a whisper in the fog of his nights. The one constant had remained working with computers — solving problems with a tool that did what and only exactly what you told it to do. Little wonder, then. Easier to think in 0s and 1s than admit you’ve gotten too lazy and tired to keep up with the people around you. It’s admonishment that echoes in his head routinely, motivation mistaken consistently for self-deprecation. Easier to bury your feelings than admit people don’t seem to understand or care.

Her forehead is pressed gently against his cheek, her bare abdomen and hips solidly against his. He listens to her breathing softly, and is convinced for a moment that this is all a dream, nothing more than a dream, a passing jumble of neural signals he’ll forget with the dawn. I need a camera, he thinks. A full range view of this room, this moment, this beautiful human beside me. And the talent to use it, to capture this, that it’s not forgotten and lost in the shadows of my brain. He feels her leg crooked over his, soft and cool and so comforting, feels her gentle breath on his neck, smells the slight undertones of bourbon and cigarette.

He takes in the details, every one, from her head to her toes and back, again and again. Repeats what he sees, hears, smells, feels, more granularly with each pass. Draws an image, carves a tableau, ingrains the essence of a three-dimensional holograms, over and over and over until the moment is as real inside as out.

And smiles. Not in binary, not with the purpose of solving a problem, not with concern for tomorrow or yesterday, but at peace and in the moment, words and sensations his own camera.

One Life, and how to remember it, ideally…

(This was originally written in March of 2011, and I had a brief moment of panic when I couldn’t find it in any of my storage places for my writing. I’m not generally super happy with most of what I write, but this was an exception. Thanks to M for being able to find it a decade later, and passing it on to me.)

I think and talk a lot about the soundtrack to our lives. Some people live life in a silent film, to stretch this metaphor; they never listen to music, or they consider it a nuisance, or (worst) are apathetic about it. I’m on the other end of the spectrum – there’s something constantly being piped out of whatever speakers or headphones that are most convenient. If I had had a say in the matter, there would have been an entrance theme playing in the hospital delivery room back (sometimes I think Puccini’s Nessun Dorma, from Turandot; too many have suggested O Fortuna). If I have a say in the matter, I’ll get to pick my exit music, as well

I did not know you
Our lives never touched 
‘Til the day they gathered 
To bid you farewell 
And they painted your picture 
And as I looked around 
I felt I saw you 
In the words and the sound

They called her Nana. In fact, it wasn’t until about thirty minutes ago that I ever knew her actual given name; I had to text my girlfriend to find that out. But then, that’s what you do with grandmothers, right? The first-born grandchild mispronounces the word grandmother, and that nickname sticks forever. It did with me, though I’m still not certain how my lack of speech impediments managed to turn “grandma” into “Merv.”

I never met Nana, as a matter of miles. She was in Boston, after moving here in the middle of last century from Scotland. I did talk to her once, briefly, on the phone, and eavesdropped on a few phone conversations thanks to the iPhone’s speaker. My girlfriend would call her on holidays, and ask her to tell one of her many jokes; she would let me listen in, and her brogue always made me smile, no matter what the punchline was.

Your talent came flowing 
Through the stories they tell 
And through the the faces 
Of those who loved you so well 
Your life gave them a treasure 
A piece of themselves 
Something to carry 
And still serves them well

There are a lot of songs about loss. As much as I don’t pay attention to lyrics, a lot of those songs are rubbish for me, because they’re too morose, or focus too much on the end of things. Not that that’s bad, or unnatural — I think our tendency as humans is to give in to grief. There’s a lot to be said for the comfort to be found in a blanket of sorrow.

But when it comes to people, to a human life and all that comes with it, I think it’s really important to push past that, as much as possible. Instead of dwelling on the loss, focus on the memories of the good, the things that impacted us as people, as friends and family and, sometimes, strangers.

I don’t know the full story behind Brian May’s Just One Life like I do with some other songs, but I kind of like it that way. To me, it’s the perfect song for today. It’s a poignantly sung lyric, a beautiful melody with a perfect arrangement, and if I tried for a million lifetimes, I couldn’t put the sentiment into words half as well as he did.

Perhaps inside you 
You were messed up like me 
But them you were whole and strong 
And friend in their need 
And what you left behind you 
And what swept over me 
Says that your life’s work 
Rolls on and on 
A piece of eternity

The exactness of this story is questionable, and the details aren’t important:

There’s a hospital room in Boston, and there are lots of relatives keeping watch over Nana as she sleeps peacefully. One of the relatives has brought in a portable CD player a few days earlier, and my girlfriend suggests in the early afternoon that they play some music (one of the hospice workers had suggested that even though she was sleeping, she might hear what was happening in the room around her). Her brother mentioned her favorite CD, and so they put the disc in and hit play, and as the first notes of her favorite music began to fill the room, she took her final breath, and moved on to whatever you want to believe happens next.

And through all the mixed feelings that flooded my head when I was being told this story, as the words rode the airwaves and bounced off of satellites and crossed the hundreds of miles between Birmingham and Boston, as memories of my own grandmothers bounced around like pinballs, one thought was constant: Nana was a lucky woman. With all the craziness in the world today, out of all the possibilities, she got to pass from this world sleeping peacefully, surrounded by people that loved her and listening to her favorite music. If I can save all my good karma and choose how to spend it, I think I’d like to cash it in on exactly that.

Rest peacefully, Nana. Your spirit carries on.

Just one life 
That is born, and is, and is gone 
Just one life 
And I’m so glad to know you 
As I know you

Brian May, Just One Life

These were the best of times
I’ll miss these days
Your spirit lit my life each day
My heart is bleeding bad
But I’ll be okay
Your spirit guides my life each day

Dream Theater, The Best of Times

For Susan McGregor (1922-2011)

Just One Life lyrics written by and ©1993 Brian May, from the album “Back To The Light”; The Best of Times written by and ©2009 Mike Portnoy, from the album “Black Clouds & Silver Linings

The constant variable of change is at my core…

Do you imagine that trees and other plants feel? That they experience sensations, just in a way that we humans and our egocentric way of thinking are incapable of understanding? When the wind blows, or birds make their homes in the branches, or lightning strikes, do you think that maybe there’s some semblance of pleasure or pain?

Image result for Trees
I sure hope they aren’t as self-critical about their appearance as we are…

Too, what do you imagine a tree feels if it is uprooted and transferred to another location? Excited for a new environment and surroundings, perhaps, or anxious about leaving the only home it has ever known?

At least it doesn’t have to worry about packing, moving all its stuff, changing its address with the USPS, transferring bank accounts, and all that mess.

Not rules as much as just the way it goes…

It always starts with an image.

Maybe it hasn’t always been this way, but it always is now. An image so clear yet dreamlike and unsharable, at least by his hands – never good at drawing, painting, sculpting, or even capturing with cameras, but his brain overflows with visions astonishingly beautiful and horrific.

And so sometimes those images attach themselves to music, something random piping through his earbuds. Heavy, ethereal, cinematic in its own right, whatever. There’s no rhyme or reason to the process, that he can understand. It just happens — music sees imagined vision from across the crowded bar, and after a few shots of liquid courage, music hits on vision and they get married and live together happily ever after.

This, then, is the source. Like an album full of songs that are crafted solely to support a single riff or short chord progression, the stories and characters and dialogue flow entirely as an excuse to describe a lone image that he can not otherwise share with the world.

That’s the sad secret, one which he shares begrudgingly but also suspects is not his alone.

Solitude Notwithstanding (Apologies to S. Vega)

I don’t want to be lonely
I just want to be alone…”
-silverchair, ‘across the night’

For his second wish, Steven chose to give the genie freedom.

It felt momentarily surreal, using a wish to provide the giver with something equally powerful, but also right. Why shouldn’t he, having been given the present of solitude through a wish, not show his gratitude by reflecting that gift on a being who was imprisoned, chained to him through a fairy-tale curse?

Not to mention that Steven wasn’t really sure what else he could want, that wouldn’t have the dreaded cataclysmic kick-back effect.

And so he wished for the genie what he had wished for himself, and the genie thanked him, and disappeared, a fog that gradually faded from view, leaving Steven unable to say with certainty that the genie had ever been there.

Although of course it wasn’t imagination or dream; his first wish had been been granted, and he still had the weirdly disconcerting bottle on his shelf, the genie’s discarded prison left behind as a constant reminder.

Solitude, Steven was coming to realize, was a one-way mirror, and your enjoyment of it depended entirely on which side you stood, and what you wanted out of it.

On the one side, self-reflection was all that you found. Yourself staring back at you, with everything that lay behind you as well. Pleasant for the narcissist in yourself, probably.

On the other side, you can watch as the world goes by, crawling day by day through its paces. It’s a real-time reality TV show, without the scripting and the editing for reaction shots. So much so, as it happens, that watching it is all the interaction you have.

But that mirror, he thinks, has its flaws, those areas where light is refracted and bent, making you look warped. There are smalls slivers of glass missing, and those places make the worldview hard to enjoy.

And after a while, when you’re the only one left, who else is going to clean the glass but you?

He had almost missed out on his chance to live a fairytale altogether. It almost seemed to him, on reflection, that the genie wanted to be found. The bottle was attractive, certainly, but not the usual thing that would catch his eye. Not to say non-descript or ugly — more that he was past the point in his life at which he looked for treasures, hidden or obvious.

Simple was enough for him, but after passing it a few times with his eyes, he was eventually drawn enough to it to pick it up, and out came the genie. End of story. Or beginning, as such things happen.

Steven had long dreamed of something special, something unique happening to him, so when it happened, he had thought himself ready, incorrectly. It took a ridiculously long time to make his first wish, though he quickly followed that with his second, almost as though the two were intertwined.

He had a fear of consequence, of reactions unforeseen. That was the way of the fairytales he knew – penned by Serling and Joyce and King, where the wish is granted, and enjoyed, until ultimately revealing the universe’s desire for balance. He worried that wishing for world peace would end in overpopulation, that riches for himself would deprive another of everything they had ever known, that any of his desires would be met with something inversely undesirable.

In time, after careful consideration and thought, he asked for and was granted the same thing he gave (in a way) to the genie – freedom, which in his case meant solitude.

“Time can erase not just the future, but also the past.”
-penn jillette

Steven was very bad at many things, but he was very good at discovering that. He wasn’t bad at everything, by any means, but many things that he thought he wanted to do quickly revealed themselves as out of his reach, for varying reasons. He wanted to play sports, but his body wasn’t built for physical competition; he wanted to act, but was far better at exploring himself than understanding not-him people. But he tried, over and over – that, he was very good at.

He tried relationships, but was never very good at them. He tried being part of groups with similar interests or hobbies, but quickly grew exhausted. Teams asked too much of him; friendships, over time, would change and drift away. Even being a hermit didn’t work out, but in time, he finally sorted it out – he liked being around people in a distant way that didn’t ask or expect too much from him. It was far from what he had dreamed of – just like his films and his chess playing and his woodworking abilities – but he accepted it, because Vonnegut once wrote “So it goes,” and he liked the simple poetry in those three syllables.

And so he wished for a world in which that was okay, and granted the being with the power to give him everything he had could ever wish for, anything he could ever want, the freedom to chase the same, or whatever else the genie might want for itself.

In time, Steven grew to learn the consequences of his wish, and they were everything he had expected. He was happier without having to make commitments to others, or having to account for their wants or desires. He was sad many nights, without someone meaningful to share his thoughts and experiences and feelings with. He did what he wanted, whenever and wherever he wanted, without explaining himself to anyone for any reason. But he did everything alone.

He did everything lonely, which was fine, because that’s what it was.

One day, Steven decided that he needed a change. For no discernible reason — no one incident changed things for him, no overnight dream of different things or sudden light bulb that things might be better, waiting on him somewhere else. It was just time.

He had forgotten that there was one more wish waiting for him, but he had never forgotten the genie. They had spent so much time together without the expectation or hope of what would come out of their relationship, and he had grown to love the genie, without ever realizing it, without naming it. Theirs was a preternatural closeness and understanding, and though details of the genie’s face and voice had begun to fade into a glamorized imagination of a memory, his love for the genie’s company remained crystal clear in his heart and his head.

And so he set out, with only the most important of physical possessions, leaving everything he had ever known behind. He didn’t know how to find the genie — not even how to begin — but he knew that it was worth trying, worth the look.

Because with the genie, he had found someone with whom he could be alone without ever being lonely.

He didn’t need another wish — just the determination and opportunity to really make his first wish come true.

You got your solitude
And I got my peace
And nothing in that moment matters more
If only in just this one fragment together it grows
This tree… may be i must maybe lost
Right where i need to be…”
-steven wilson

12/19-12/24 2015