November 10, 2011

• Half Light

  I have a theory that we only properly see a certain kind of person. 

  At my job I have to categorize customers away because there are so many to deal with; I can’t possibly put a terrible amount of thought into each one.  Those people, ones you have to categorize away into the crowd, are very far from you.  Then there are your friends that are very close.  But in a way you have a certain set interpretation of your good friends, one that misses certain things in them, things you don’t have the capacity to see given who you are; and so their good-friend-to-you status is based on that angled interpretation of them, but you still rely on it, because that’s how the friendship moves forward.  And finally there are people that you have met, and you have a minimal relation to from having seen and briefly talked to them, and that is the person you have a piercing sense of wonder about.  They are a totally independent entity, they have a life, you can see the suggestion in a single laugh or brow-knitted nod that they are complicated, that you don’t know how they work, that there is so much more to know.  It’s that wonder, that deep, serious, momentarily experienced wonder about someone that is the most proper attitude you can have about another person, and it happens to people that are at that middle-distance from you, the people you haven’t yet interpreted into having a certain role.

  But most people we shovel away, or we have a set interpretation of.  We rarely see people as they are, radically, wholly others that see the world – they really do – through their own voluntarily rotating eyes.

  It’s probably easier to keep hope about your dreams of improving your life and the lives around you when you live by an ocean, or cliffs that overlook the woods, or where the stars clutter the black night sky like evidence of a giant cackling fire hidden deep in space.  Because with just one look at those you think, ‘Oh yeah, there’s a bigger picture, and it’s beautiful and worth fighting for.’  But when the city is your head you can only think as far as the smog allows. 

  In the secretest part of you there’s a death that needs to happen, and only you can do it.  No one else can kill it for you.  The truth would be a kind of death.  We think only of rewards and not of the costs of things; we divorce many more things than just our wives once we find out how difficult they are.

  I have to think out loud, otherwise I don’t think at all.  It’s a disease.  People who don’t talk have been cured of a rabid infection. 

  It’s a big risk to reveal your brokenness, your sinfulness. The real stuff, not the fluff words we use as empty references. When you say what you really do wrong, and how you can’t help it, man, that feels awful. But when the someone you tell listens to it and looks past it to see the good you you want to be, gosh, that feels great, like everything else you worry about will work out too.

  A few weeks ago I looked up and saw a slew of crisscrossing contrails streaking the sky like a batch of uncooked spaghetti on a plate.  The city suddenly shrank to the size of a thimble, and I could relate to them, being just travelers in the great blue sky crossing other travelers, going to a place where all these skyscrapers mean nothing and the trail you left on the way means everything.  The sky is my context, not the city.  

  But the gray days will come, and that’s what friends and tea and books are for.

  • 3:47 am
  • 3 Comments