Wednesday, July 22, 2015

The departing bus



And just like that, we parted ways.

There are three truths: what I saw, what she saw and what happened. The last one is, counter-intuitively, the least relevant. In the end, I insisted on ignoring the facts. Reality still yells at me pretty loudly. But my reality departs from yours in more than one way.

Life was good. I was the luckiest of guys. I kissed her and she kissed me. Ain't that a kick in the head, as Dean Martin always sang?

When nurturing a garden, perfect moments can be experienced but not preserved. It all comes and goes. Paraphrasing Ferris Bueller, if you don't stop to smell the roses once in a while, you will die without having actually lived. Yet, we insist in getting too attached to them. Then, we interrupt our journey to contemplate them, or attempt to bring them with us. But roses rot. It does not matter how much you water them or the amount of sun they get. They will still die in our hands if we attempt to keep them forever. As it turns out, it is not the rose's thorn that hurts the most. The real killer is its ephemeral nature.

A brief story was meant to follow this introspection. It had it all: love, lust, confidence, strength, mistrust, betrayal, disappointment and acceptance. It was meant to present you with a slice of human experience that would have felt quite familiar to some. But it is also testament to how good we have it as a society nowadays. Instead of worrying about war, famine, or even unemployment; we worry about love, or lack thereof. That is what songs and poems are written about. There is no story to follow these thoughts...

We are always looking for the best, brightest, most rewarding of experiences in life. It is our ruin that when we get it, we end up longing for what we had and lost.