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Here's a short introspective piece that I've left floating around in limbo for a while. I was hoping I could get some criticisms, suggestions, abuse, etc. from some fellow Barbelites...)
Title: I Always Thought I Told the Truth
In our entire range of positive and negative emotions, nostalgia is the cruelest. It causes you to see something wonderful, and then reminds you that it is gone and that it will never again be yours. Nostalgia is loss. Riches to rags, forever. It is chronic, progressive, retrospective tragedy.
Heaven was the idea that nostalgia and the present-tense were not mutually exclusive, or that one could possess feelings as poignant about life in motion as he could have for life that has already passed. For thousands of years, people everywhere toiled and suffered throughout their entire lives trying to determine whether or not this was true. To this day, nobody knows.
When I was still really little, everything was at once utterly awe-inspiring and unquestioningly probable. Not only did I want to be Superman, but I was reasonably sure that, barring a change of my own heart, I would be. I can pinpoint the moment this part of my life ended. One of the greatest injuries of my childhood occurred when I discovered that I couldn’t fly.
The costume, full blue and red spandex and cape regalia accompanied with the trademark gold belt and assorted accessories, was forever ruined. My mom ran it through the wash the next day but couldn’t get the blood out of the suit fabric without bleaching it a feminine shade of pink and sky blue, color tones unbecoming of that Kryptonian avatar. Meanwhile, I spent Halloween in the hospital, waiting for my turn to be stitched up and shipped out. The scar on my left hand in particular is more visible now than it was ten or fifteen or however many years ago it was that I soared like an eagle (read: dove like an osprey) into a thicket at night and encountered something inanimate, hostile, and sharp.
Even then, it was my parents who had to break it to me, reluctantly, uneasily, as if it were not fresh wounds but actually Santa Claus or even God himself lying exposed across the palms of my open hands. For some reason, I just didn’t notice. Pain was something new to me, the full scope of which I had not yet begun to experience, and perhaps for this reason it was taking a little while to register. I thought I was fine, botched crash tests of my powers of flight be damned, but then my parents went and told me that my hands were bleeding, and that they were bleeding a lot and all over the place, and then it was all over.
This is not to say that I lost my superpowers all at once. Though I no longer had much confidence in my ability to fly unaided, kept aloft by the graces of magic or my alien anatomy, I experimented heavily with wings of wood, cardboard and, eventually, plexiglass; however, these ended with similar, if less bloody, results. So I stopped that business and settled down with paper airplanes and model jets, but that epoch of my aerial exploration, thankfully, was short-lived. My hands at the time lacked the subtlety to make them well, much less make them fly, and usually instead of focusing on the task at hand I would think about how I could have been building the golden, magnificent airships of my neon fantasies instead, if I didn’t know that they would crash and burn like winged cement bricks. I stopped making models. I took up swimming.
Parents call this growing up. Adults call it coping. Both are a progressive series of small deaths which pulls the initiate farther away from paradise, the stupid and ignorant fantasy world of our infancy where everything is infinite except for our limitations, and closer to the real world. A year ago I would have put real world into quotes, as if to question the truth of its reality, then gone on to describe it in a meticulous invective as being a “manufactured spirit prison” with “confines, entrapments, distractions, the place where souls go to die” – something idealistic enough to make me feel young and important, and bitter enough to make me sound experienced. In truth, it doesn’t really matter how I see it, then or now or in one or ten or fifty years. The world is what it is. Nostalgia lies to us. All we really have is our memories.
We are not walking with each step towards our eventual graves; we are crawling hand-and-foot like infants back towards the womb. Each of our actions is taken in good faith that they will lead us back to the time when we could have impossible things. Money, power, possession, sex, drugs, love, family, religion, ambition - these are the rungs of the crib’s ladder. If you accumulate enough given experience without falling head-first onto the nursery’s linoleum floor, maybe you can go back to the feeling of being tucked in at night and drifting off again into sugarplum dream reveries, all the while grinning with toothless little gums. Once all things are said and done, the pursuit of meaningful comfort embodies what motivates us, what we desire, what we want.
So what do you say about somebody who no longer wants anything, except to want something?
Eighteen years of dubious growth and experience. Four lines and a name are all I have learned.
Why did you lie to me?
I always thought I told the truth.
Why did you lie to me?
Because the truth lies like nothing else and I love the truth.
--Mark Strand, “Elegy for My Father” (courtesy of Tobias Wolff, Old School) |
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