I went out for a walk today. The birds were twittering and the sun was slowly beginning to rise, though the streetlamps were all still glowing. In the past I would probably have been struck by the beauty. I walked down the avenue, not really looking at anything in particular, actually I was more focused on loosening the pack of cigarettes wedged in my pocket more tightly than should have been possible. Eventually I got it out though....and allowed my once-a-week habit to take over. Once-a-week. Is there really any point in that? Honestly, I don't care if I die and right now, I'm not completely sure I can if I wanted to. As for the pain of cancer, if I'm even capable of such things anymore....perhaps I deserve that. Maybe my limit is just something to prove to myself that I'm still capable of control. Still capable of control despite my ever-growing lack of morals and initiative. That would make sense, wouldn't it?
Anyway, flicking the ash off my habit, I turned down and walked into county park. I always seems to end up there whenever I go for my walks, though not really from actual forethought of my own. There's a lot of history there, in that park. A long time ago that's where they'd used to have fairs. And hangings. It's kind of interesting to think about what kind of things used to happen in this old town...though I suppose by now they don't matter so much anymore. Not very many people even remember them, as, little by little, the past is forgotten..
Does it really just go away?
Will I too?
Does it even matter?
They have a little river flowing beside said park. It's actually really quite gorgeous. Think white water rapids just on a shallow, smaller scale. It's captivating to see the little white wavelets flow and crash unto one another, and better still to step in and feel them cool and gentle up against your skin. Trees looming up in their dark green-and-brown magnificence complete the picture. It's really quite the sight. If you ever chance upon this town, chance upon the park, take a stroll by the river. There'll be a little wooden bridge at one point that leads out to an island in the middle of it covered in grass and trees. Take a left and walk out to the end of it. You'll see what I mean. It's gorgeous.
That's were I ended up today; on that little island in the wee hours of the morning. I remembered my own history here with this little river beside the park. Sounds strange doesn't it? I have a history with a river, and an altogether very important one too. Once I walked up this river with a friend of mine and two girls. Ashley....this little girl who was constantly abused by her widowed mother, both mentally and physically. Kind of sad to see a girl who could've been so much more slowly be twisted and screwed up by a parent. She's not so bad, not really, even if she can tweak and be strange at times. Kayla was the other girl. Kayla was tall, elegant, smart. Was just starting to get breasts in too. Seems strange that I remember that exact fact., but then again, maybe not. We were just starting to step into that whole new world of sex and lust and dating and whatnot. It's the sort of thing a man will notice, you know? Anyway, we decided for no real reason to walk up the river some. See where it went. We took off our shoes and socks and began to step up. To begin with the water's pretty shallow and full of those mini-rapids I was talking about earlier. Pretty rocky but nothing all that sharp. Then you pass under the ancient iron bridge that connects one end of town to the other, right next to the old stone bridge that does the same, but for, in the ancient past, horse-drawn carriages and tugging logs out of town to get to the train station a little ways out. We've always had a bit of a lumber business up here. The iron bridge is kind of strange, though. Has little iron spikes all up and down it, not really spikes in the sense that they're there to hurt someone or to for some violence, but rather like the spikes on a cog. Very reminiscent of a factory piece or something that it is used for the unfathomable. Unfathomable to me anyway.
Underneath the bridge the water is a bit less satisfying, it deepens up quite a bit and there are quite a lot of large rocks up there slick with algae and perhaps other unnameables. There's a bike under there too. I ran into it, I remember. After the bridge you hit a deep spot. You can barely even tell you're near town at that point as well. The trees just hem in and you can't see any trace of civilization through their encroaching canopy. Looking back you can see the ancient stone bridge...but for some reason that seems completely in place and natural for such an archaic scene. Did I mention it gets deep? Ashley's short...she didn't want to go through it when me and my friend hit the deeper spots, being the ladies' trailblazers and protectors, of course, and sunk in up to our high chests. Kayla, being a tomboy, didn't care, she was willing to go forward as long as it was cool with everyone else. I told ashley I'd carry her though and she climbed on my back and I walked with her through the spot and she stayed there for most of the trip, clinging close to my neck. I didn't mind. I was more careful not to fall over with that much extra weight on my shoulders though. I remember making believe that i was like a horse or some other form of living transportation and that I was trusted and believed in implicitly. I really liked that.
As you move further down the river it widens up and stays relatively deep, belly-to-rib level for the most part, that is, about 4ish feet. The rocks grow less numerous, but they grow very large as you go deeper down. There are small boulders about as tall and wide as I am, but very rounded and also some smaller. In the river itself is was mostly just some thick mud. I remember wondering how the stones got there. I said so. We threw out a bunch of suggestions on possibilities. None seemed too plausible. We just kept walking and talking about various things that really have no relevance anymore. We eventually hit upon a crossroads and we were surprised that the town’s river would have converged from two different ones? It was very strange to us. At the middle of this convergence was a big boulder about twice as tall as I was and 3 times wide. It was a large, rounded thing. Ashley got down off my back and I set her on a boulder next to it and I climbed up to the top next to kayla and my friend. I remembered being happy about that. A couple times along the way I had thought about how much better it would've been to have her on my back instead. Now I didn't dislike ashley or anything, but there was just something about Kayla that drew me to her like a fly to honey. It's funny how certain particular women can command so much power over certain particular men for no real reason besides beauty and grace. Is it wrong to be willing to go through so much for beauty? "A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness." Someone somewhere said that. Makes sense, I think.
We sat up there and kayla laid her head on my shoulder and I wrapped my arms around her. Awfully familiar of a position for me to be in with her, seemed right though. No one else said anything so it didn't really matter. It was just right. We eventually walked back and my feet were all cut up from sticks and some of the stones.....sore and tired too. It was worth it though.
That was quite a long time ago. It's interesting, for me, anyway, that I still remember memories like that. Sad, too. Seemingly innocent and chaste when really, deep down, I wasn't. I'm still not, even now, though now at least I realize that all my actions are just a little game so that others don't avoid me. So that they like me and keep me around so I’m not alone.. So I play the game, you know?
So anywhere there I was quietly smoking, sitting alongside the spot where I had set my shoes and socks down alongside the river so many years ago. Seems like just yesterday. It's much darker now than it was. We walked down the river in summertime at about noon. Very full of sunlight. The darker colours now reminds me of another memory of this river; a much more powerful one, back from when I first started with my late night walks into the mourning to smoke my weekly cancer stick. Like I said, I always seem to slip into the park. I think that's because I would always want to be alone on my walks. Walking with someone else and talking always seems to lose the magic, even if the talks hold a good deal of gravity. I always preferred abandoned places, old places, places with great history. History has a call to it. Some histories more obviously than others.
On one of my earlier walks I was walking across the steel bridge, with a great pain in my heart over some of the events I was dealing with at the time. The loss of your first real love is quite painful....nothing in the future ever hurts again that much. You'll never ever love as innocently, purely and powerfully ever again. That is, if you'll ever let yourself dream again. Anyway. I was pretty upset. Had been for weeks. I don't let things go too easily, always takes a good deal of time. And I was walking across the steel bridge and I stopped and looked down at the river below. It was flooding the island some and the water was rushing much faster than normal. But it didn't look like water....it didn't feel like water either from where I stood. It looked like an oily ichor oozing and folding in upon itself in some strange sort of beckoning dance. I don't mean beckoning figuratively either. Somehow in some way the water was calling me. It wanted me down there in it, covered up in it's sticky-wet lifeblood. Deep down I realized and knew that if I jumped that I wouldn't hit the rocks that I knew were there just a foot or two below the surface. If I were to jump then and there I would have sunk and went through, deep into the absolute blackness, and I would look up and see the pale white glimmer of the moon on the surface fade away as I sunk deeper and deeper into the comforting depths of that abyss. Slipping away from such a hopeless and hateful world. Becoming nothing and no longer caring ever again.
But I didn't. I couldn't. I was afraid of what the consequences might be if I did. A man can't put himself in such a situation and come out unscathed, you know? At that point I still wanted to believe in the power of love, in the power of goodness and caring and absolute truth. I felt like I had a lot to learn. I walked back home, then, and didn't walk again nor smoke for months.
As the years rolled on the world corroded that innocence even more. Two more loves were lost, one spiritually, the other completely. Relatives died, betrayals were made, work in various fields all proved to be fruitless and similarly unsatisfying. I finally saw life for as hollow and lacking in fulfillment as I had always been told, and yet, somehow never believed. The Dream had finally exhaled it's last breath and I was ready. I was not afraid. I was not worried. Honestly, i just didn't care, even though, for no reason I can think of other than that it was going to be a situation I hadn't even done before, I was apprehensive. I walked back out to the steel bridge at around 11:45, looked down into the awaiting maelstrom of oil….and I jumped.
And I sunk, just as my intuition said I would. Or is it just as the river told me I would, told me in it's own way? Either way, I sunk down into the warm sticky depths. Surprisingly it was quite a bit more comfortable than I had expected; above my body temperature. I turned myself over as I sunk, and I did indeed see the moon fading away as I slipped deeper and deeper into the depths. Then it happened. It wasn't exactly the slipping away from the hopeless world as I had expected. A sensation not unlike choking gripped my body and I spasmed. It wasn't choking on the water, no, I could 'breathe' per se in that seeming abyss, it was more like the atmosphere around me was choking me intentionally and it burned, my god it burned. It ripped through my body like injected heroin slams into you in a rush. Then it was gone. I felt somehow different, though I couldn't tell you what. I closed my eyes to sleep.
I woke up alongside the river at some indeterminate time in the night. I wasn't wet. I wasn't cold. Was it all just a dream? A hallucination? I wasn't sure to begin with. Didn't matter though, so I walked home to go to sleep, thinking I must be too tired to be out and about at this hour. In the weeks to come though, I noticed that a lot of things no longer bothered me. My lost loves, my unfulfilling jobs; they just didn't matter anymore. I could look upon old love letters and not feel a thing, even though I would remember as sharply as if it were yesterday. It definitely wasn't merely 'forgetting' what had happened, so what could it be? Could I have suddenly been successful in smothering all traces of the emotions I felt regarding this individual? I doubt it, considering I was feeling them for EVERY NIGHT prior to the experience alongside the river, as well as that night as well. Then what about work? What about all the frustration at the lack of mental stimulation that I used to crave so much? Suddenly it seemed that the same repetitive, dull, and uninteresting job was sufficient. Even preferable. It just didn't make sense.
After a month or two it clicked, though. I just didn't feel anymore. I didn't feel and I did not care. I hadn't lost anything besides that, though. I was still as sharp as ever, nor was I going insane, at least, I didn't think so and neither would the textbooks I learned, upon reading. It's funny, though. I always thought such a world would be vastly preferable to one where I had the capacity to love and to enjoy myself, but really living like this is just....it's just grey. Everything is just grey. There is nothing really truly different from anything else. Rich is not really different than poor outside of different circumstances. Fundamentals are the same. Living as a 'good' person is not inherently better than living as a 'bad' person. Fundamentals are once again the same, if you look. Same with work. What's the difference between working at the factory and working at the market? Either way you work for a reason, a pointless reason mind you, but a reason, and the only real difference is what you're actually doing. So it's all kinda irrelevant. At least it is to me.
What's more is that I don't seem to be able to love anymore. That sounds a lot more dramatic than I intend it to mean, but it's true. I just can't bring myself to give a damn about anyone, least of all myself. That strikes me as strange in a rational sense, though honestly I don't mind it. Just a curiosity, that's all. No sense of loss when I think about it, though other literature and other accounts of love all seem to suggest that I should be hurting a great deal, hurting and mourning the loss of my ability to love. It's a very terrible thing, they say. They're wrong, though. They just don't realize because they're too busy floundering around in their seas of emotions to know what true calm and neutrality is really like. It's interesting to think about, though. It leads me to other thoughts though. Thoughts about how long I'll be this way or if I'll be like this forever. Will I ever be able to love, to feel again? I haven't forgotten how it felt, if anything my memory is very much intact and functioning; I remember the soaring and the plummeting as relationships were started and ended. If I was insane I wouldn't be able to remember and think so clearly. Nor think so rationally…would I? It's all very curious...but that's all that is. Curious. Deep down I know that I don't care to have them back and I don't care if I stay the way I am. I know from what others have told me and from things I have read that that should probably bother me, that it's a warning signal of sorts. But I don't care about that either. Why should I? I have my cigarette and I'm sitting here...just before a beautiful dawn-to-be in one of my favorite spots. That's enough. What need do I have for feeling, honestly? This is enough.
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