The time I learned to fly, part one

The events centering on Pandora came to their harrowing conclusion towards the end of my junior year of high school.  I was turning seventeen that summer, and excited to graduate high school during the ensuing school year.  I was still pretty torn up over how it ended with Pandora, and I made several attempts to re-establish contact with her to apologize.  Even then, I knew what I had done was reprehensible, and I was obsessed with finding a way to apologize, to convey even a fraction of the remorse and guilt I felt for how I had treated her that fateful night, but every attempt came up empty.  It would take another three years or so before I gave up completely, but always to no avail.  It was then that Pandora transcended, becoming more than just a memory, more than just a girl I used to know, and evolved into a mantra, a force, an influence so pervasive that I can hardly recall a time without it.

Despite all that, however, you may recall that, at the end of “The Time I Learned Regret, Part Three,” I mentioned that the regret (and, by extension, Pandora herself) was a catalyst for an even greater change.  You may be wondering, then, that if that regret was just the prelude, what is the main event?  If Pandora was just the spark, what could be the flame?  Extending the flammable metaphor even further, in addition to the spark, you also need something combustible in order to truly create a fire, so before we can go into detail about the fire, I must first set the stage with the combustible element used to feed it.  Bear with me, dear reader, as we go back in time to when my mother was just a teenager, age seventeen.

Dramatis Personae

Alex (me) – the protagonist, referred to hereafter in the first person

Mom – my mother

Dad – my dad

Gina – One of mom’s older sisters

Nolan – Gina’s firstborn son

Becca – my sister

My mother is the second youngest of nine siblings.  The important thing to take away from her family is that her mother was abusive, her father was an alcoholic, and one of her older sisters, Gina, was a teenage mom.  To hear my mom tell it, Gina was quite the party girl when she was younger, and had Nolan when she was very young.  Nolan was eight when my mom was seventeen, and she pretty much raised the kid for most of his life, as Gina was, well, quite the party girl.  Due to the amount of time mom and Nolan spent together, and how much bonding was established during such crucial times throughout Nolan’s development, it is not surprising to discover that mom looked at Nolan as her very own son.  I have seen a few pictures of Nolan from when he was that age, and if you had not told me otherwise, I would have believed I was not my mother’s firstborn child; that is how obvious it was to any observer that mom raised Nolan.  For all intents and purposes, he was her son.

My mom was seventeen when Nolan died.  They lived in a really small town with a population of under six hundred people, so it was pretty common for kids Nolan’s age to bike to the playground unsupervised.  On the very edge of the park, there is about a three food wide sidewalk that gives a pretty good buffer from the curb, and then the main street through town.  You know the kind of park you see in some of those old photographs from the 50’s and 60’s in rural towns?  With the tangled web of steel as the jungle gym, the towering slide with so many dents that it is nearly impossible to slide all the way down on?  The kind of park with a rusted but still mostly working merry-go-round?  That is the kind of park this was: picturesque.  It belonged in a faded memory of simpler times, of long summer nights thick with the humid air of a coming storm, pierced ever so wonderfully by “The Entertainer” tumbling enchantingly, announcing the arrival of the neighborhood ice cream truck.  You get the idea.

Nolan was riding his bike on the sidewalk just after noon on a Saturday when a drunk driver, going well over the speed limit, mounted the curb, and proceeded to run Nolan over, dragging him the remaining forty feet or so where the sidewalk ended.  The driver then crashed into a light pole, knocking him unconscious.

It is a small town, so it did not take the sheriff long to respond to the scene.  The ambulance was not as swift, but I am told it would not have mattered; Nolan likely died on impact, they said.  I am no medical examiner, so I am hardly an authority on the subject, but I would think that a car would have to be going pretty darn fast to kill someone on impact.  I think the sheriff told that lie as a piece of mercy, because any lie was better than the likely truth that Nolan died when his broken body was dragged beneath the truck.  So much pain, so much fear…

…and then nothing.

Gina was heartbroken.  Mom was devastated.  To hear my dad tell it, mom struggles with Nolan’s death even today, and I cannot begin to imagine what that would feel like.  I have the deepest sympathy for any of you who have experienced any such tragedy in your life.  I cannot think of any fate worse than burying a child.

I tell you this because it relates to the story.  It is important to know part of the motivations behind my mother, and what drove her to be the type of parent she became when she had two children of her own, because it is my relationship with my mother that would become the combustible element that would become sparked by Pandora, and grow into the fire I mentioned, earlier. 

Three years pass, and my mother meets my father, they marry, and three years later I come into existence.  Three years after that, Becca joins the fold.  Mom has her own family now.  She moves out of the town she grew up in, away from the haunting memories of the life she loved that was taken from her far too soon.

Unfortunately, leaving does not help her nearly enough.  I never met Nolan; he died several years before I was even born, but from the day I entered this world, I have existed in his shadow.  I never really understood what was going on until many years later, when my dad explained it all to me, but for the bulk of my early childhood, I was measured against Nolan in my mother’s eyes.  I even remember her calling me Nolan a handful of times by mistake.  Or at least I tell myself it was a mistake.  I tell myself that mom suffered a great tragedy, and when memories of Nolan were close to the surface, she’d just fall back on old habits and accidentally call me by his name.  I tell myself that because it beats the alternative; that my mother sees me as a twisted revenant of a veritable son she lost so long ago.

That I was weighed against a young boy I could never measure up to created some friction throughout my youth and into my early teenage years, but the true lasting effect Nolan’s death had on my mother was in how protective she was of me.  Under no circumstances was I allowed out of her sight until I was five years old.  Needless to say, I didn’t go on many play-dates as a young kid.  As time went on, she evened out a little bit, but she was always incredibly paranoid about my safety, and often went to severe lengths to punish me when I jeopardized such safety.

Grounding a child is pretty common punishment when they make notable mistakes or do particularly naughty things.  I was not a child prone to misbehaving.  My mother drilled into me that the world is a terrible, frightening place, and that the only one who can protect me from it was her.  I became the poster child for the term “Mama’s boy.”  Anything she asked, I did, and anything she wanted, I gave.  Anything she said, I believed.  She had me wrapped around her finger, and I had no idea.  Looking back, it is easy to point out the instances where her manipulations were used to keep me dependent on her, to keep me “needing” her and her “protection.”  If I ever did anything to compromise her grip on me, I would be grounded in monthly increments, which always seemed harsh to me, considering how little trouble I got in under a conventional sense.  I would get grounded for being told I could go outside and play, but then played with another kid on the playground, because I only had permission to play outside, not play with another kid.  I would get grounded for being told I had to be home by 7:00, then arriving home at 6:57, because I “should know better than to be less than five minutes early.”  If I were to total it all up, I would guess I spent about a year of my life, from age seven to sixteen, grounded.

The moral of the story is that she was incredibly protective, and incredibly strict, but interestingly, only with me.  Becca, my younger sister, was given incredible slack compared to me.  I would get grounded for a month for getting one “C” on a report card, whereas she would just get a mild lecture when she came home with all “D’s” or worse.  I was not allowed to stay the night at a friend’s house if mom had not met their parents, but my sister was not subject to the same limitation.  At times, I wondered if that was not a form of neglect on mom’s part, but I would later come to realize that, once again, it pointed back to Nolan.  Mom had developed a twisted perspective of how the world worked based off how Nolan died, and her own perceived strength in raising him all those years ago.  She viewed boys as weak and incapable of surviving without their mother, and girls as independent and strong enough of spirit to look after themselves, even at a young age.  I am not here to refute nor defend her logic, but simply stating what her mindset was in order to properly indicate just how strongly losing Nolan continued to grip her.

From the start, it would seem my proverbial wings were clipped.  How, then, did I ever learn to fly?

In a sense, I owe some semblance of thanks to Arnold.  He convinced me that, while I might not always know what is best, I do have an opinion that is at least worth listening to, and that simple realization struck a crack in the dam that mom had erected around my sense of self-worth.  Like a crack in a dam, it grew as its own integrity was no longer strong enough to contain the pulsing torrent contained within it.  I started to view a great many aspects of life with my own eyes, rather than through the lens mom had tried her best to color my perceptions with.  It may sound needlessly poetic, or perhaps even overly dramatic, but it truly felt like I was seeing the world for the first time.  I started seeing things, not just looking at them.  My previously telescopic vision had been replaced with a kaleidoscope of wonder and possibilities, and I spent many late nights with just about any friend who would humor me conversing about philosophy, religion, politics, and all the other topics that teenagers introduce themselves to, and subsequently believe themselves experts therein.  The world mom had “prepared” me for was a fading illusion, and with eyes no longer clouded by her influence, my heart began to beat with a new vigor.  It was about this time that I developed an interest in writing and finding ways to articulate the human experience, and I took my newfound passion for the English language online.  I am dating myself a little bit, here, but chat rooms were all the rage once upon a time, and I spent many a sleepless night conversing with the multitude of digital personas inhabiting cyberspace. 

Having only recently developed a point of view of my own, being introduced to such an endless supply of conversation was like surging through a storm and kissing a bold of lightning; the rush of energy was intoxicating, and I drank greedily from the founts of their collective “wisdom” (I have quoted “wisdom” here because putting it in italics did not capture the amount of sarcasm I wished to convey adequately enough).  Fortunately, it did not take me long to realize that 99% of the people I spoke with online were just noise.  It was that 1%, however, that set the stage for my coming of age…

The price we pay

“Sorry” is a powerful word. It has the capacity to heal, to forgive, and to forget. It allows us to be absolved of our mistakes so that we might find a way to move beyond the moment of our transgression.

Forgiveness seems so simple. If you wrong someone, you apologize (provided that you find yourself at fault), they forgive you, and you put it behind you. Sounds easy, but what happens when “sorry” is not enough? How do you react when the apology you hear does not promote sincerity? Must forgiveness be granted, simply because it was asked for?

Time often heals what words cannot, and time can certainly forget...

...but can time truly forgive?

I find myself at a dangerous crossroads. Nearly five years have passed since that fateful day, and I cannot help but wonder if the right part of leaving turned out to be wrong...

A person can be broken down into several different personality traits, but at my core, I am a simple man; I am a man of principle. I have one line, ONE line, that you do not cross, and he crossed it. Though time has healed the wound, I still remember, and because I still remember, I cannot forgive.

I want to forgive. I want to forgive him so bad that it literally hurts some nights. Here I stand, nearly five years later, and still the decision weighs heavily upon my conscience. He was one of the closest friends I had ever had; shouldn’t that have counted for something? Shouldn’t I have been able to forgive him?

But what would I be without my integrity? What kind of man would I be if I drew one line, only to forgive anybody who crossed it? He had the audacity to test my conviction; in the end, what choice did I have? I could either a) do the hardest thing I have EVER done in my life, but remain true to who I am, or b) preserve a morally bankrupt friendship by condoning the one type of behavior I made clear I would never allow, and though time has given me cause to question the virtue of my decision, I have never once questioned its integrity.

“Sorry” is a powerful word, but it is not omnipotent. As romantic as it seems, it cannot conquer every betrayal or erase every sleight; some mistakes are meant to endure, destined as they are to remain forever unforgiven. They serve as a permanent reminder of how we once believed we could take something (or someone) for granted, and how much we had to sacrifice in order to learn just how wrong we were...

A blast from the past

I find it fair to warn you, before you read any further, that this post is neither particularly comical nor insightful, and to be honest, it is not even all that original.  Lacking for anything of merit to put up here for your viewing pleasure, yet desperate to at least pretend I care about updating this blog, I present two old journal entries I managed to dig up.  I include them because I found them to be fairly well written, and as an entertaining means of exemplifying the rallying cry of youth: “I know best.”

Nearly three years ago, I wrote the following:

The darkness wanted a whisper, but instead I gave it a voice.

The curtain rises, and I see the actors on their stage, how out of position they all are, how embarrassing it is to watch them miss their cues. I should stand up, show them how it is done, but that is not the nature of deceit.

They forget their lines, but they hide it well. To their credit, they handle improvisation better than expected, but I see through the masquerade. They have the audacity to think they are pioneers, that they are the poster child for all that duplicity entails. I should stand up, show them how little they truly know, but that is not the nature of subtlety.

It is not the arrogance with which they saunter about, parading behind their delusions and their convictions that disappoint me most. Truth be told, I applaud such efforts, for you can never hope to deceive another until you have learned to deceive yourself, and they are utterly enraptured by the fantasies playing out before them. Ultimately, this is for the best, for it is wisest to keep fools distracted; if you engage them mind to mind, wit to wit, you will always lose. I have seen those who fancy themselves grand manipulators humbled by the sheer tenacity of the fool, for the more convoluted the machination, the easier the fool will unravel it. You cannot confuse with metaphors and clever analogies when they read straight through everything you say, taking it all at face value. Such is anathema to the true deceiver, for every deceiver knows that nothing is as it seems; if it was, they would always appear to their victims as they are, the proverbial wolf, rather than what they disguise themselves as, which is the proverbial sheep.

The trouble with lies, however, is that they multiply quickly. The true deceiver knows that one lie is always more convincing than two, but I see their menagerie on stage, and though the backdrops are all wonderfully crafted, they are destined to betray their own ambitions by the sheer complexity of their art. “Keep it simple” is the mantra to lie by.

It is enough to make one wonder if there truly is such a thing as lying for a purpose. Such existential quandaries are better used as weapons of confusion than actual cause for consideration, for nothing sets people unawares quite like challenging their conventions with rhetorical questioning. It is important to remember that the true deceiver does not need to fool the target for long, just long enough. Hide your intent until all semblance of motive has been erased, and you give the target no cause to doubt your sincerity.

That is the difference between me and those impostors on stage. They obscure themselves from the intricate subtleties of the trade, and as a result, leave themselves remarkably transparent to anyone with eyes suspicious enough to see them.

Lies become us all, sooner or later. The key is not to become a “liar,” for a “liar” makes a habit of telling lies, and lies are but a minor tool in a much greater arsenal for the true deceiver. The separation of master and student is defined by not only the understanding of this concept, but also by its application.

All that remains is a final question, but it is the most important question a true deceiver will ever ask of himself: “What am I lying for?”

“True deceiver?”  What arrogance led me to write such nonsense?  Was I implying that I, myself, was a “true deceiver?”

Looking back, I can envision the circumstances that inspired this little journal entry I locked away, but it is almost humbling to read it and reflect upon it in retrospect.  It is not the information itself I find so embarrassing to read as of now, but it is the conviction with which such words were written.  I speak as though I actually possess some command of the art, as though I were one of its oldest and truest scions.

I have since met those who most certainly earn the title of “true deceiver,” and after having met them, I cannot believe I ever dared to place myself amidst their ranks.  A fool I remain, but it is inspiring to know that I am less the fool now than I was three years ago (even if that margin of improvement is slight).

I was once told that the truth is simple, it is the liars who complicate things.  I wonder, then, why lying comes so much more simply than the truth?  That, to me, seems a more appropriate question than “what am I lying for.”

Here is something I wrote about a year and a half ago:

“Sorry” is a powerful word. It has the capacity to heal, to forgive, and to forget. It allows us to be absolved of our mistakes so that we might find a way to move beyond the moment of our transgression.

Forgiveness seems so simple. If you wrong someone, you apologize (provided that you find yourself at fault), they forgive you, and you put it behind you. Sounds easy, but what happens when “sorry” is not enough? How do you react when the apology you hear does not promote sincerity? Must forgiveness be granted, simply because it was asked for?

Time often heals what words cannot, and time can certainly forget...

...but can time truly forgive?

I find myself at a dangerous crossroads. Nearly three years have passed since that fateful day, and I cannot help but wonder if the right part of leaving turned out to be wrong...

A person can be broken down into several different personality traits, but at my core, I am a simple man; I am a man of principle. I have one line, ONE line, that you do not cross, and he crossed it. Though time has healed the wound, I still remember, and because I still remember, I cannot forgive.

I want to forgive. I want to forgive him so bad that it literally hurts some nights. Here I stand, nearly five years later, and still the decision weighs heavily upon my conscience. He was one of the closest friends I had ever had; shouldn’t that have counted for something? Shouldn’t I have been able to forgive him?

But what would I be without my integrity? What kind of man would I be if I drew one line, only to forgive anybody who crossed it? He had the audacity to test my conviction; in the end, what choice did I have? I could either a) do the hardest thing I have EVER done in my life, but remain true to who I am, or b) preserve a morally bankrupt friendship by condoning the one type of behavior I made clear I would never allow, and though time has given me cause to question the virtue of my decision, I have never once questioned its integrity.

“Sorry” is a powerful word, but it is not omnipotent. As romantic as it seems, it cannot conquer every betrayal or erase every sleight; some mistakes are meant to endure, destined as they are to remain forever unforgiven. They serve as a permanent reminder of how we once believed we could take something (or someone) for granted, and how much we had to sacrifice in order to learn just how wrong we were...

This was apparently more prophetic than I ever could have realized at the time.  That last paragraph rings true, even now.  Strange how time can either rob something of its momentum, or grant it additional gravity, but never does it seem to promote a sense of complacency or stagnation.  It either lessens or strengthens the intensity.

Thus ends this mummer’s dance, and if you made it this far, you have not only my thanks, but also my adulation; that was no small feat. 

The time I drove a man to suicide

"The ancient Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing." - Socrates

What am I afraid of?

When answering the question of what one’s greatest fear is, I think it is important to delineate the difference between true fear and reactionary fear.  Reactionary fear is the act of being startled by something unexpected or sudden, and it is the extreme application of that sense that the bulk of horror movies depend on to deliver their thrills.  Even someone who is not afraid of spiders might find themselves momentarily startled, or frightened, when one unexpectedly lands on their lap.  A loud noise, an unexpected touch, or even the absence of something expected can lead to a reactionary fear, but that is not true fear.

No, true fear is something that affects you before the object of that fear is even realized.  The mere mention of it can invoke a sense of dread, and it is often something we think of even when that fear is inapplicable.  True fear is something we dwell on past the moment of its initial sensation; it is not reactionary, but compulsory.  We do not wish to feel that fear, nor are we confined merely to experiencing it when a specific stimulus triggers it; true fear transcends circumstance.  True fear whispers and lingers, haunting us long after we are separated from any aspect of its influence, which is precisely what makes that fear so daunting; we are NEVER beyond the sphere of its influence.

I have only one such fear.  Sure, if I am sitting in the shade of a lovely tree and a spider falls on my lap, I will be startled.  Sure, if I am rounding a corner and someone jumps out and shouts “boo,” I will be startled.  Through it all, however, there is only one thing I truly fear.  This is the story of how I came to realize this fear, and how pervasive its hold has been on my interactions with those that I hold dear.

I could not have been any older than thirteen, now that I think about it.  Puberty was in full swing, and the world was beginning to grow into a more complicated place.  Girls held a certain sway I had never noticed before, hygiene was becoming a more important chore, and my responsibilities (both in school and at home) were beginning to increase as a preparation for what all the adults told me would lay ahead in my later adolescence.  Truth be told, I was fascinated by that premise.  Even as a young teen, I was introspective, spending much of my free time in thought, pondering the mysteries of the universe (and at that age, everything held a sense of mystery), and I began to grow a bit of a reputation with my peers for being “wise beyond my years.”  In this instance, what they meant to say was that I thought more about society and my role in it than most at that age, but that should never be confused with “maturity.”  As such, their frequent praise in this regard stroked my ego, and I grew to fit the role they slowly began casting for me.  If any of them needed any insight at all, or any suggestion on how best to handle a situation, they would come to me.  Never mind that I had never asked a girl out, or that I had never lived with physically abusive parents, or ran away from home, I had something to say on every problem people brought my way, and so I got into the business of giving advice.

That, in and of itself, is not such a bad thing.  I was reckless with it, however; I did not preface my suggestions by saying “in my own opinion,” or “I’ve never been in your situation, but I think this is how I’d handle it;” no, I was very brazen in saying that “this is what you should do.”  To make matters even worse, my advice was often unsolicited.  To date myself (no one else would, at that time), “if you have a problem, I’ll solve it, check out my hook while the DJ revolves it.”

Problems came and went, but there was one specific friend I had at the time who came to me with an issue that would forever change my opinion on the giving of advice.

He and I were not particularly close, but we ran with the same crew, and he knew I had a penchant for offering insight most young teenagers could not pick up on, so he came to me with a girl related problem.  It was a pretty cut and dry issue; he liked a girl but was convinced she did not know he existed, and his self-confidence was suffering as a result, which prevented him from asking her out, which in turn diminished his self-confidence even further…

…you know how it goes.

To say that I was aggressive with my responses would be a disservice to the forcefulness with which I spoke to this friend.  From what I knew of this friend, tiptoeing around his feelings was not going to get through to him; he needed a tough love, of sorts, and I bore into him with the tenacity of a drill inspector having a bad day.  My hope was to tear down what little self-esteem he had so we could build him up into someone more confident, but in doing so, I drove the man to an act of desperation.

After our talk, he was feeling pretty fired up, and he said to me, “I am feeling great about myself; I am going to put everything I have into asking this girl out!”

“Great!” I said, “Go get her, tiger!”

“I will!” he declared.

So he talked to her at school the next day.

“Hey, girl of my dreams, would you like to go to a movie with me, sometime?” he asked, less timidly then I had feared.

“Heh, um, no.  Not even a little bit,” she replied with the casual cruelty only teenage girls are capable of. 

We spoke very briefly after school that day.  The conversation went a little something like this:

Me: “Hey, tiger, how’d it go?”

Him: “Hey, not good.  She said no.”

Me: “Oh, man, I’m sorry!  How are you holding up?”

Him: “Not great.  I really gave that my all, you know?”

Me: “Yeah, I hear you.  Well, I bet it feels good to know you tried, right?”

Him: “Not really, no.  You don’t get it, I put everything I had in that, and she rejected me.”

Me: “Well, plenty of fish in the sea, right?”

Wrong.

I treated his comment of “…I put everything I had in that…” as dramatic hyperbole, but I could not have been further from the truth.

We lived in the same apartment complex, and later that night, an ambulance and police car arrived with their sirens blaring (the fire truck did not show up until all the excitement had already died down).  It would seem that my friend had tried to hang himself, and was narrowly saved when his father came in to see if he needed help with his homework.  No note, no final words to his parents, just a grim determination to end a life he felt had been spent wastefully on one hail mary date proposition.

He spent three days undergoing psyche evaluations before he came back home.  I do not know all the particulars of his release, only that his family moved away later that month.  I saw him on that final day as they were packing up the moving truck, and despite my normal sense of propriety, I had to ask him one question.

Me: “Why did you do it?”

Him: “You told me to.”

Me: “What?  No I didn’t, I would never suggest anything that would hurt you!”

Him: “But you did.”

I did not understand at the time how poignant his remarks were.  I thought he was confused, thinking I advised him to commit suicide when all I had done was help him find the courage to conquer his fear, but the truth was that I drove him to an edge he could not return from.  He meant every word when he told me he had put everything he had in it, and when it came crashing down, his entire world fell with it.  I advised him on something I knew next to nothing about, believing that theoretical musings could service practical application, and in doing so, I drove a friend to suicide.

So what am I afraid of?

I am not afraid of death.  I am far too curious to learn what happens next, and though I do not hasten its arrival, I look forward to it with an almost macabre curiosity.

I am not afraid of being alone.  While true that no man is an island, we are far hardier creatures than we tend to give ourselves credit for, and I do not buy into the despair that any loneliness now must be perennial.

No, what I am afraid of is giving you advice, having you take it, and then watch you suffer for it.  I am afraid of being so presumptuous as to tell you how to live your life, get you to believe I am right, act on it, then bleed to prove how wrong I was.  I am afraid of transforming my wisdom into your woe; a fear which holds sway over me even as I write this. 

If any of my tales written thus far have a connecting theme, it would be the arrogance of youth, and there is no truth of my childhood more exemplary of that arrogance than this one.  It is not that I nearly killed a man; no, I drove that man to the very depths of his sanity and shoved him past any and all semblance of personal comfort.  I did not help him expand his personal boundaries so much as I demolished them all in the hope he would find something there in the remnants of his adolescent abyss.  To that end, I succeeded, but what he brought back with him was a twisted thing, and to this day, I can picture his eyes as he said his final words.  They were not the eyes of an angry man, nor were they the eyes of a crazy man.  They were the eyes of a defeated man, a man who, on his friend’s advice, went up against the very fear which held him hostage and failed to conquer its hold on him.  They were the eyes of a man who trusted me to help him, the eyes of a man who was betrayed by something he had dared to believe in.

They are the eyes of my own greatest fear.  They see through me and all the carefully crafted facades; they strip away any sense of understanding I had about how the world worked, and revealed me as the charlatan I was.  They are the eyes which stare at me, unblinking, whenever I dare to think that I know what is better for anyone than they do, themselves.

Socrates’ ancient words echo in my mind whenever I am faced with that haunting stare from yesteryear, but I will never be free from the dread I feel when I hear the phrase “you are wise beyond your years.”  My fear taught me a valuable truth, however, in that you have to learn that you know nothing before you can begin to understand anything.

I guess it just goes to show that we are never too old for growing pains.

Honor and pride, for which many have died

It is an interesting morality to ponder on that which you would die for, and that which you would live for. They say that to give one’s life is the ultimate sacrifice, but I find there to be many fates worse than death, which is not to mention the heartache your death would inflict on those who either cared about you, personally, or also followed the cause for which you died. Far better, they would say, to live for such a thing than to die for it.

Honor, of course, would demand that you die for what you believe in, for as illustrated above, it is the common understanding that to give one’s life is the ultimate sacrifice, and what nobler, albeit tragic, death could one achieve if not to die for what one believes in? But if given the choice, would you shirk such honor so that you might live to serve that ideal another day? Or, by compromising such integrity, do you forsake that which you believe? Honor and pride are complex devotions; those of honor and pride strive to live well, but they also wish to die well. Many of that ilk would prefer to die for something they believe than rather than old age, but such romanticized behavior inevitably destroys the lives of those left in the wake of their parting. Could you die so honorably knowing that, by doing so, you would break the hearts of those who cared about you? Is protecting them from that sorrow worth your honor?

I wager that is where integrity comes in, and I confess that such a dilemma is of genuine concern, for how does one weigh such things? In the above example, it almost makes such integrity seem selfish. Perhaps it is.

At the end of the day, it is entertaining enough to speculate, but such conjecture means little when faced with such an opportunity. When the time comes for you to have such a choice, I imagine time will be a factor and you will act on instinct. Where that instinct is born from, however, will be a curious thing to discover. Is your integrity so deeply rooted that your initial reaction to such a situation will be to give your life for what you believe in, or are you the selfless sort who would compromise your own integrity for the sake of living for the cause, and perhaps more importantly, for the ones you love, instead?

Honestly, I hope you never have to find out.

A perfect place

No anecdote today; instead, a work of pure fiction.

The hill wasn’t high, but it crested the beaches of the lake in such a fashion as to make you feel larger than life for standing at its back. The valley walls standing their silent granite vigils added to the enormity with the sheer rock barriers hundreds of feet high, crags and cracks home to nesting hawks whose caws were the only thing brave enough to clash the reverent silence of this place. Aromas of the clear blue lake danced a wild tango with the peaches of a nearby tree; out of place in the kind of way that only a dream can be.

“It’s perfect,” she said lazily. I glanced down to see her resting, her back against the peach tree as the stainless grass cradled her weary form, her eyes closed until they sensed my own tumbling into her. As they opened, her lips bound for her brilliant emerald pools in such a graceful sprint that I could not help but smile in turn. A warmth nestled deep inside me, and I kept her gaze for a moment before turning back to look idly upon the calm water.

“Do you hate it?” I asked, my voice noticeably devoid of emotion. She stood in an effortless motion, and moved to my side, stopping with her shoulder just inches from touching mine. She followed my eyes to the middle of nowhere. “It’s boundless,” she started, “pure as when the world was new.”

I nodded. “Do you hate it?” I asked again.

She hesitated for a long moment before she whispered, “Yes.”

“Why?” I breathed, my voice barely audible.

She turned to look at me, and with impossibly honest eyes, she said “It’s missing flaws.”

A smirk I could not contain crept its way across my face, and I shot her an approving look. “If you could put a scar anywhere here, where would you put it?”

“Right here,” she poked at her left breast, “so that the waves and the peaches and the moon and the sky can look into me and weep, for I am beautiful not in spite of my flaws, but because of them.”

I kissed her, then, on top of the hill which smelled of peaches and lake water. It was such an ugly place, this perfect world, but our broken hearts made it beautiful, if only for a little while...

The time I learned regret, part three

Arnold was not so villainous as these stories have made him out to be.  While true that he would grow into more vile acts of betrayal, at this point in our history, it should be noted that he acted primarily out of jealousy, rather than true malcontent.  Did his jealousy drive him to some pretty poor choices?  Yes.  Did I buy into his every excuse and hardly plausible lies?  Yes.  He was more than a best friend to me, he was a brother; not of blood, but of bond.  I revered him, and in many ways, I envied him.  He was smarter than me, stronger than me, better looking than me, more comfortable around women than me, better at Goldeneye than me.  He was just about everything I wanted to be at that point in my life, and I looked at him through the eyes of a younger brother idolizing his college-bound older sibling.  Sadly, as a result, I was blind to the machinations his jealousy had wrought, and so I trusted in him for guidance, much to my shame and dismay.

Time has robbed me of the particulars of the third date with Pandora; all I can recall is that it was a rather awkward affair (the last time I really remembered feeling uncomfortable in my own skin) that ended shortly compared to our previous dates.  The heart of everything, as it were, came in what happened the following day.

I received a call from Pandora asking if I could come over to her place to talk about “us.”  Naturally, I was nervous.  Despite how ludicrous it seemed, I could not help but think of the article mom had shown me the other day, and how I was about to be sued for breaking a prom date promise.  Unable to quiet the riot in my own mind, I called Arnold and asked him if I could get a ride to Pandora’s.  Arnold bartered that he would do it only if he could stay in the car while I talked to her.  I did not think anything of it, so I agreed.

Before I relate to you the events that happened that night, I would like to thank you for reading this far.  The retelling of this monumental event has taken much longer than I had originally anticipated, as I underestimated how much background information was relevant to properly appreciate the gravity of all this.  I could not just jump to this point in time, say “there was this girl I really liked that my best friend also liked, and then we had a conversation that changed the very nature of who and what I am,” and call it a day.  That is the essence of it, yes, but to appreciate the scope, you need to understand the gravity.

Pandora was not just a girl.  She was the one who opened up the forgotten jar, the chest in which all the woes of mankind were stored, but in doing so, she left me with one remaining emotion: hope.  Yes, she introduced me to pain and heartache, envy and anger, shame and regret, but she also introduced me to the life-saving tenacity of hope.  She was many emotional firsts, but she was also someone I never fully grasped the entirety of.  These stories told so far suggest our outings were counted four times: three dates, and the night we all played pool, but the truth is that I gathered many subtle cues of body language, speech patterns, and other such habits in the class I shared with her for an entire school year.

We exchanged casual non sequiturs as often as we spoke of anything of importance; even after she dumped me the first time, circumstances required us to speak from time to time, and it was always pleasant and more than a little cryptic.  To put it simply, she fascinated me.  I was as enamored with her as a young boy in what he thought was love for the first time can be, but perhaps more than that, I was intrigued by her.  It was not a latent mystery she harbored so much as an alluring sense of… insanity, I guess.  It was clear from the way she talked and the way she acted that she was operating inside her own world most of the time, and that sense of fantasy and wonder was intoxicating to behold.  Being a part of Pandora’s life was like being transported to a realm where the rules were what you made of them; she proved to me that “sanity is the playground of the unimaginative,” as it was once famously said.

I also needed you to understand that I hung on Arnold’s every word.  That is very important for what comes next.  And without further delay, let us recount the conversation that changed my life.

Pandora is waiting for me when I arrive; we have the conversation on her porch, and as best as I can recall, it went something like this:

Me: “Hey, you wanted to talk?”

Pandora: “Yeah, want to sit down?”

Me: “Okay.”

Pandora: “You’re a pretty nice guy.”

Me: “Thanks.”

Pandora: “I wasn’t finished.”

Me: “Sorry.”

Pandora: “It’s okay.  Can I finish?”

Me: “Please.”

Pandora: “You’re a pretty nice guy, but I’m scared.”

Me: “Scared?  Scared of what?”

Pandora: “Of you.  Of liking you, because I couldn’t stop, even when I wanted to be mad at you.”

Me: “Why were you mad at me?”

Pandora: “Because of what Arnold told me.  I didn’t know he was lying until it was too late.”

Me: “He lied?”

Pandora: “To me, yeah, he said that you said things that didn’t sound like things you’d say, but I know you two were thick as thieves, and why would he lie?”

Me: “He wouldn’t.”

Pandora: “Well, he lied to me.”

Me: “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Pandora: “If you say so.”

*long pause*

Me: “What’d he tell you?”

Pandora: “That you were only dating me to scout it out for him.”

Me: “That’s not true!”

Pandora: “I know.”

Me: “So what happens, now?”

Pandora: “I don’t know.  I’m still scared.”

Me: “I’m not scary.”

Pandora: “You are to me.  My other boyfriends, they didn’t play along like you do.”

Me: “I like the way you see things.”

Pandora: “I think that’s why it’s scary.  I like that you like it.”

Me: “Why is that scary?”

Pandora: “You’re not very good at this, you know.”

Me: “I know, sorry.”

Pandora: “Me too.”

Me: “I wish I had something worthwhile to say.”

Pandora: “I love you.”

Me: “I love you, too.”

Pandora: “No, you don’t.  You only said that because I said it, first.”

Me: “No…”

Pandora: “Yes, you’re lying.”

Me: “I’m sorry.”

Pandora: “I know.”

*long pause*

Pandora: “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

Me: “Okay.”

Pandora: “That’s it?”

Me: “Whatever you want, I want to give you.”

Pandora: “Of course, of course.  You can leave, now.”

Me: “Okay, goodbye.”

Pandora: “Goodbye.”

I left, slowly, while she sat on the porch, watching me go.  I made it to the car where Arnold was waiting, and before I opened the door, he rolled down the windows and we conversed as quietly as we could:

Arnold: “Hey, did you do it?”

Me: “Huh?  No, she dumped me again.”

Arnold: “I’m sorry, man.  Hey, could you go over and put a good word in for me?”

Me: “I don’t think she likes you like that.”

Arnold: “Alex, no offense, but you don’t know women.  They never make it obvious when they like you.”

Me: “I don’t know, Pandora made it pretty obvious she liked me.”

Arnold: “And then she dumped you.  That worked out so well for you.”

Me: “True.”

Arnold: “Look, I can tell you’re upset.”
Me: “Yeah, I did just get dumped.  Again.”

Arnold: “Why don’t you get a little revenge, then?”

Me: “What kind of revenge?”

Arnold: “If you make her cry, that means you get the last laugh.”

Me: “Why would I want to make her cry?”

Arnold: “Because she hurt you.  I can see it in your eyes; you want to cry.”

Me: “Yeah, it hurts pretty bad.”

Arnold: “Then make her hurt, too.  That’s all you can do in situations like this.”

Me: “Are you sure?”

Arnold: “Trust me.”

So I did.

I made my way back to where Pandora was sitting, my heart thickening in my throat.  If ever there was a time for words to fail me, this was it.  Unfortunately, I chose this moment to discover my hidden talent for verbosity.

Me: “Pandora?”

*Pandora smiles* Pandora: “You came back.”

Me: “Yeah, I had something I wanted to say.”

Pandora: “Please, say it.”

“Please,” she had said.

“Please.”

Me: “I don’t love you.  I wanted to, but you made it impossible.  You hardly ever spoke a sensible word to me when we weren’t talking about school or the weekend or music.  It was like you enjoyed the confusion your obscurity created, and I don’t know if that’s how you manipulate people, but I’m sick of it.”

Pandora: “Manipulate?  What are you talking about?”

Me: “I wasn’t finished.  Can I finish?”

Pandora: “I’d rather you didn’t.”

Me: “Now I’m talking too much?  You weren’t complaining when you left me grasping at straws in the coffee house damn near a year ago.  Who does that?  What kind of freak would ask someone out on a date and go mute for the entire thing?  Were you playing some kind of trick on me?  Were you making fun of me for all the ridiculous things I was saying?”

Pandora: “No, I love the sound of your voice, and you were amazingly creative with all the things you brought up.  The story you told of how the stool got so red was really great.”

My tirade stumbled for a moment, here.  In that instant, I realized Arnold had it wrong.  Pandora really did like me, she was just frustrated that I wasn’t showing more emotion.  In an effort to give her what she wanted, I was playing off her every comment like it was gospel.  I did not understand how to read between the lines, or what it means to be passionate about something, but in that moment, it all became so painfully clear.

For the briefest of moments, it looked like I might be able to salvage all of this, but then I caught a glimpse of Arnold out of the corner of my eye.  He was nodding in that grave manner that an executioner wields just before coming down with the ax, and the look he gave me said louder than words ever could: finish it.

Damned fool that I was, I ignored the part of me that was excited to hear Pandora say she loved the sound of my voice.  I choked down the elation I felt when she said she loved me.  I swallowed every reason I had to make this moment beautiful, and I painted it as ugly as I could.

Me: “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

It did; oh, god, it did.

Pandora: “I don’t understand what you want me to say.”

Me: “Stop treating this like some abstract equation or logic problem!”

Pandora: “Okay.”

It took the wind out of my sails to hear her say that, her voice thick with defeat.  I had just torn down the very core of her personality and laid it bare against the harshness of my venomous words.  The pleading in her eyes made what she said next cut with the sharpness of a thousand knives:

Pandora: “I love you.”

Me: “No, you can’t.”

Pandora: “I can, and I do.”

Me: “It’s Arnold’s birthday soon, you know.  Why don’t you love him instead?  Maybe saddle on up and give him a lap dance?  Surely his birthday is good for that!”

She cried.  I watched.

This went on for about three minutes, both of us silent except for her sobbing.  The worst part, despite all that I had said up until this point, is that when she was done crying, she looked up at me, eyes red and as earnest as any I’ve ever seen before or since, and asked:

Pandora: “Why can’t you love me?”

Pandora was beautiful.  There is a reason most of my friends made plays for her affections, after all, and it was not all as a result of her unconventional personality.  It blew my young teenage mind to see such a pretty and popular girl appear so vulnerable.  A girl that could have had any guy at school she wanted, but here she was, broken down because I would not love her.

No, it was not a question of “would;” it never was.  It was always a question of “could,” and the simple answer was “no.” 

I wish, I truly wish I could write here that I said something tender, or polite, or at least humane.  Anything would have been better than what I chose to say, instead, which was nothing.  I stood perfectly still and stared right through her.  I did not look at her; to do that, I would have had to acknowledge her as a person, but in that moment, I stared right through her.  Like she was a piece of smoked glass with the strangest of cracks developing around the contours, its entropic pattern a hypnotic dance of fissures.  In a moment where saying anything at all would have been but the smallest token of kindness, I gave her silence.  I gave her less than nothing; I could not even be bothered to acknowledge that she said anything at all.

I turned around, and I left.

The drive home was quiet.  Arnold could feel the anger rolling off me like a building summer storm, and he knew better than to be the one to let its rage loose while in the car.  So we drove in a silence that was not much of a silence at all.  It was thin and threadbare, fragile, as if the slightest distraction could have unraveled it all, shattering in thunder and hate.  Not like the silence that followed Pandora’s unanswered question.  That was a silence thick enough to choke on, the kind of silence that chains itself to a conscience and haunts it for years to come, the kind of silence that has eyes that judge.

Yes, if I had to sum it up succinctly, I would say that it was the kind of silence that has eyes.  Eyes as red as Pandora’s, so rich and full of tears you cannot help but drown in.  Accusing eyes, eyes that forever ask “Why can’t you love me,” eyes that point out each and every missed opportunity.  The worst kind of silence.

I wanted to hate Arnold.  I wanted to hate him so badly I felt like I could actually feel my blood flowing in my veins, but for as much as I wanted to hate him I knew I could not.  He was an asshole and an opportunistic jerk at every opportunity, but the person I really hated was myself.  Every time I had a doubt, or a question, I asked for everybody’s opinion but my own.  Even when I felt I was doing the right thing, I always bowed to the wisdom of others, and it drove me to one of the cruelest things I have ever done, even to this day.

I wanted to hate anybody.  Everybody.  I settled on hating myself, and rightfully so.  The hate was a spark, however, and it lit something inside me.  Something that had lain dormant for the entirety of my relationship with Pandora: passion. 

“Never again,” I mumbled as Arnold dropped me off.  He did not seem to hear, which was just as well.  Those two words were strong, but not strong enough to measure what I had just done.  I needed something bigger, something that would shield me from making that mistake ever again.  That is when I strung eleven words together that changed the way I viewed my heart, my mind, and my world:

Follow your heart, for regret is the heaviest of all weights.

I carried that regret with me for ten years.  Ten years of self-inflicted emotional duress.  Every dating fiasco that followed, I blamed myself.  Every time a woman betrayed my trust or played with my heart, I convinced myself I deserved it.  Through all the torment and the torture, however, there was a beautiful light guiding me through, for never did I lose sight of those eleven words.  Through it all, I learned what it means to love without fear.  Over the years, I grew into a man who truly embodies the expression “love like it is never going to hurt.”

Too late for Pandora, the girl who opened my eyes to what it means not to live, but to be alive.  She changed everything by unlocking the passion inside me, that remaining sliver of emotion that was spared by hope.  Like the jar of Greek mythology, she opened it up and purged it of all its wickedness, all its evil, until only something beautiful remained.  I am sorry beyond any capacity for words that I had to unleash all that evil unto her, but I truly emerged as something better for it.

In a way, I am fortunate; my regret became a catalyst for the most important change in my life, but that, dear reader, is a tale for another time…