quiet rivers

It was a conversation, set in no particular atmosphere except for the light touch of banter between friends, that did not end as it started. But it was one that left me something to think about, in the relatively-quiet somnolence of the afternoon hours. It was only a small, offhand, observation; yet, thinking back, she had a certain preoccupied air that I’d noticed, as if memory condemned self, as well as the gender, in some obscure, resigned, manner.

“Women can have so much to say, when there’s no need for such gregariousness, have you noticed that?” She had said. “So much BS…”

“Men too…?” I shrugged the slightest bit, deprecating; thinking there was so much that man needed to know about women, so much that women failed to see in men, one way or another.

She had seemed startled when I said that, half-giving me a searching look — wondering what I’d half-divined perhaps? — and half-turning away, lifting a studiedly-languid hand in dismissal.

I went home, none the wiser, silent while I tapped a finger on the steering wheel to the rhythm of Tony Rich’s “Bird’s-Eye View”. All the way to the patio, out back, where I usually ended up stealing a few guilty puffs from a cancer-stick, and sitting back against the lounger, drifting on the heels of a thought. Trying to get a nose-edge ahead…perhaps for a sideways perspective on an improbably-unfocused itch.

What must it be like to find one fascinating person, while at the same time, invent a method of literally getting into another’s skin, and then being able to get into each other’s? What might I see from behind another’s eyes? How truly different might it feel to accord life with a meaning and a purpose beyond your own senses and insight? How might another’s pain feel so different, or so similar?

Frivolous exercise, you think? This philosophical indulgence; sitting at leisure, letting thought pour out against a backdrop of mortal realization — is this a luxury no frailty can afford to speculate against? Perhaps so. And perhaps, for all that there’s so much in life to make room for, the ways we might best connect to each other, and all that may be different and similar among us, might yet be found during those times when we sit down during our quiet times and practice putting ourselves in another’s place, inside one other person’s skin. There is so much that is precious in the human heart, even in the human body. There is so much that is intolerable. So much of what closes us off from even trusting our best friends with our vulnerabilities. What makes us so strong in our self-sufficiency also keeps us from revealing those things that weaken us. And maybe, spending time off to feel all of life, even figuratively, from the perspective of another person’s skin, can help us take those infant steps towards trust. There are only so many avenues to making your soul stronger, and over half of them go through what we learn from the people around us; from how their lives revolve around their obsessions and tiptoe around their fears, how they flinch from even the simplest invitations for sharing.

I stare at the glowing tip of my cigarette and, because the afternoon was now truly silent, hearing the crisp sound of cigarette-paper burning its way closer to my nose. Of what should I be thinking of? How might I dispel the grinding dissatisfaction that the detritus of a mere social conversation has brought down on me?

Took a deep breath. Tried to remember those times when I’ve been so wrong that I cut myself off from thinking about them in embarassment, in my own inability to accept how I might be the one holding the wrong end of a mistake. After a while, I found out that the greater my potential for shame, the deeper the intent to forget them had been. And I realize then that in the majority of human affairs, this is how we “repeat history”, in making the same mistakes again and again — by hiding them so deep inside us that even we didn’t have a whit of a chance to retrieve them, in the most objective manner, just so to learn from them. Talk about sado-masochism…

We fight so hard to learn the most basic things. We fight so hard to keep our innermost weaknesses from showing. We’re too quick to think of our world as our enemy, and equally quick to blame circumstance for its seeming cruelty. We stab our skies with questions, so much like daggers, asking, “Why me, why us, why is it so hard, why give impossibly-cruel burdens on improbably-transient lives?”

We fight ourselves too hard; sometimes, most times.

Ugh. I suddenly felt the sudden referred pain my numb behind was sending up my back. Stretched out my legs, and all of a sudden I felt another burning pain, this time on my fingers. The stub of my cigarette, almost down to the butt. Dropped it, and leapt up to my feet at the same time. Darn, I almost burned myself again. Reached out a shoe, ground my heel on the still-smoldering stub. I thought about useless thoughts — unfinished thoughts, unresolved thoughts — and being unable to connect, sometimes; with people, with nature. Then I stabbed my toe onto the cigarette stub once more, what was left of it; mangled it to tiny bits, and into the dirt. Out of my sight.

But not out of mind.

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