Unrealized

Unrequited 

Samuel Bird

Away from where we were and sojourning to where we wished to be, before us, a field as expansive as the sky. Once traversed, we were met with a mountain that was so steep, that the degree would seem to place someone back where they were. A thick forest full of foes, and us amongst them, until finally we arrived. It was no paradise to all, but it was all that I ever wanted. A cabin with a creek to the side in a clearing. Around us was a thick forest and a beautiful sky above which, was every color one could hope for. What made this place heaven was not where, but who. I had my family with me. It was everything my young mind longed for. My father was peaceful and sound. My mother was healthy and soft. My siblings were all happy to be with us. It was a place not special for what it was, but for who I was there with. I’ve had different versions of this dream since. We are all together, safe, and enjoying each other's company. The dream came so often, I thought it was a divine premonition of what would one day be mine. Someday I will share the greatest story I have. This is not the story I write in fiction, but the one fate and God wrote in fact. This story of my life is more than vain aggrandizement, but the means to share the birth of Esse Maxim. I don’t want to waste the story by sharing the ending, but this dream never happened. Everyone in my family went to different parts of the world to live alone and wait for death. This dream that was everything to me, never came to be. I looked in my shed today to find a piece of flame maple wood that seemed to have an explosion immortalized in the grain. I held it for a moment and felt my arms as heavy. This wood was to build my dream guitar. I remembered the design. I like guitars that are symmetrical and it was so. It had spikes on either side and then ended in a tail. I had a red stain and some of the other parts to finish it. It was supposed to be the guitar that would launch me into stardom with my own signature craftsmanship. In my house, the first test guitar was stashed away in a closet, unused in a decade. The test did not go well. In my grandfathers wood shop at the age of fourteen, I had too much faith in the measurements I was told, and misplaced where to put the bridge. The wood was now wasted. I never had the courage to carve into that beautiful wood. I recently went through and took inventory of all my instruments and the facts about them in preparation for their sale. I tried to not think about it as I did so. I am not pained to see something go anymore. My parents held to much value in objects instead of subjects. For that reason they could not let go of a receipt or a clothing item from a memory they never fully lived in. I have attempted to live in memories while they come, but I am aware that it is superstitious to think a photograph or memorabilia could bring a moment or person back to any significant degree. However, there is still something that pains me to see these things go. I went through my closet to look for my other guitars, and there I saw my favorite knife. Cut from an antique sawblade from a mill, this double-edged kukri blade was sharp. Wrapped around it was a quick draw sheath that my cloest friend, that I haven’t seen in years, made for me. I held it up and wondered how such a skinny kid carried such a heavy knife. My arms felt weak to hold it. Unlike the guitar, this was finished, minus a good buffing. However, there was still something about it that was worthy of feeling as I did and mourning as I was. This knife was a reminder of my great adventures cut short. My days of freedom in the mountains was traded for cold urban homelessness. The knife both illustrated to me creation, and the foregone. I recall the last time I helped my mother with all of the objects she held so dear not knowing how to do the same for people. A set of new sheets that were chewed up by mice, fancy dinnerware cracked and fragmented, and books of every sort but ones that interested me. Something stung as I kept silent in my labors. These objects didn’t lead to warm beds, warm meals, or a chance to be educated as a young man. The piles of stuff were piled high above my head as I traversed it alone to take inventory and help my mother sell things. The same skills I once used to freeclimb cliffs was now used to navigate this hoard. I stepped forward, and a crack beneath my feet. I felt that sinking feeling I felt when I knew my father was on his way. I looked down to see a picture frame with cracked glass. I swooped down and grasped it with no concern for where the broken glass went. I pulled it to my face to see the photograph. In the frame was a smiling family. They were in a park on a day brim with sunshine. I imagined in my head a picnic and perhaps a birthday. That father likely hugged that mother and that mother likely cared for that daughter, and that son... he was probably safe to eat. I snapped. My frayed and tattered psyche broke. I hurled the picture frame far from me with its stock photo that came with the frame. In my isolation my quaking fingers came up to my face as the back of my head became hot. I looked around me at the graveyard of my possibilities. My parents were alive for possibly the greatest economic period to have ever been. To have just slowed down in their veiment drive of a cliff, and perhaps my life wouldn’t now take the kinetic energy of a thousand sons to perpetuate. I thought of all the tales my parents told me of a better life to get me on their side. I thought of all the friends and plans we made and subsequently forgot. I thought of all the lovers I had known, and yet not one to be mine forever. My psyche was bashed against the precepts of modernity. I don’t want money, power, or resource. I wanted that picture frame to have my famaily. Perhaps like that dream from all those years before. My loneliness and its crushing had, as of late, became a snuffing I barely had the means to press back against. I thought back to another dream. This dream is to sacred to not share without its context as I will in that greatest of stories I will right someday. However, I can say it is that dream of my future family, our home, and her. Of all the unrealized, none will ever weigh on me like her. When I think of how this sounds I feel foolish and pathetic. I deal with the largest of ideas. My mind blasts me to the margins of being to see where mind and matter’s fringes became suspect. How can I participate in the same work as God, and yet come to myself just in time to wish for a small and feeble human to be with? For, I am a small and feeble human. I am no God. I am a man that wanted a chance to be human. However, even this feels over stated. In my mind, I hold the human race in a category. I consider them, work with them, and wonder for them, as a “them,” and not an “us”. I can’t locate it in my ontology, but I have never felt to be human. This is why I worked so hard to runaway to the woods as a child or had a fantasy I was the last human left. As much as I love humans, I am not one and certainly don’t know them. I could have been one. I was placed in a position to know them so well, see them pass by, and yet not to become one. I will die as a lone and third kind. A prototype forgotten, never to be reinstated. Then what of the story of my life? Will that book that is all I work toward, become another dream that lays in tatters on the ground? Can I bear that this aesthetic narrative I told myself,  would never be penned, and it was all meaningless suffering? You are with me. Where you are with me, you find yourself experiencing an emotive state as you do. As you are with me and heard my ramblings, you breathed your life into mine as a proverbial mode to make sense of your own. I am so sorry. To be human is to will, to be fully human is to have that will unrequited. How can we make sense of this? In my advice to others, I have asked them to list out their “non-negotiables” from life. These are those things you can’t bear the thought of not obtaining before death. I then ask them to rank order them, and then see what insights this infers. I think this could give some light to one’s effort to identify Esse Maxim. However, there are bound to be a few people who I have done this exercise with that will fail to obtain something on that list. Perhaps, they will fail to grasp the pinnacle of that heirarchy. What then can be said of one’s life? As being wills, it wills to be. All other wills are secondary. For this reason, the value of being is not given but what it gives. One’s life is not a vending machine that provides one’s dreams. What you may see in this writing today is pathetic wanting, but it is also arrogence. My faith started as I met God as someone to give what I want. He and His will has now become what I want. I will likely never have that happy family. I will never have that musical career. There are many places and people I will never see again. Perhaps I will even fail my dream of having my own family. And yet, my life will be a blessing to me. The more I write and think, I worry I waste my time. Half of what I said could be illustrated by a pointing to the cosmos. The other half was already written in that great book that put that spread the soul accross the written page and used its plight as its lettered. This is the story of Job. The role this book played in my life will be prevelant in that book I may never, but deeply hope to write. The choices are this: To curse God and die, or to not. Either we let Esse Maxim win at the expense of all else, or sell off the holy for the chaff. This is life magnified. We are presented with being and how violently at odds with our will that it is. We may make a few small adjustments as it pertains to us, however, the story goes on. We can either value what is placed before us, or not. Change it later, but bless it now. We then look at all the unrealized and unrequited, and must mourn it. My life lived is the mourning of that life that sleeping hours taunted me with. My wanderings of the last day were a fault of mine, and I compare them to a heart and soul much brighter than mine. 

Sunday dinner’s brought a group of the most uncorralated sort. A friend from a college philosophy course, my neighbor from when I was six, my sister, my sister’s husband’s brother’s fiance, and my friend from far away. Our friendship was comprised of her twenty percent ability to speak English and my ability to speak ten percent of Spanish. Thanks to our gesturing at things in the world, which demonstrated my thoughts on the philopshy of language, we were able to communicate form. My sister’s husband’s brother’s fiance spoke Spanish, so this evening it was a little easier to communicate. I sat back as they talked in spanish about their different religions as they made fun of me for drinking my beer that was against both of their faiths. It was good I thought to hide the two shots of whiskey in it. They got to know about eachother and talked about eachother’s day. Suddenly, my sister’s husband’s brother’s fiance’s face went white as her tone became consoling. “That was today.” “Si.” She turned to me to translate, but I understood the general idea. Her grandmother had just passed. Thousands of miles away on a different continent were those arms that cradled her, hands that fed her, and lips that kissed her. They were now each cold, and she was not there to feel the fading warmth. This friend might herself also not be human, but it is only because the angels might find her amonst their ranks. I looked into her eyes as they misted. She then asked me in Spanish to drive her to the river the next day. I said yes. 

She wore a long white dress with white roses and had a white woolen vest. I opened the door for her, and her and her friend climbed inside. She began to weep as we made our way through traffic to that spot in the river. We parked, and she got out. I followed as she led me to a certain spot in on the river bank. I looked to my right to see the cross from the man I had helped search for  in the river the year before, however, this life was different. In the article, “Justify Your Existence,” I explored that man’s death and some of the grieving. However, this death and grief was different, somehow more right. God had commissioned this return. My wonderful friend went to the edge of the river. A dirt covered stump acted as a small dock for her to step out toward the river. She closed her eyes and began to pray. Rather than in Spanish, it seemed to be in the local dialect her grandmother spoke, but it was hard to hear with the waterfall. She then collapsed on the ground and her weeping became wailing. People that were walking passed us on the river bank, stopped to stare. I felt some shame for a second, and then courage. Let them stare. We have relagated birth and death to locked buildings and then wonder why modern man doesn’t fathom his mortality. She weeped louder and louder as tears poured down her little face. I have often noted that men and women struggle to cognate the other’s thinking. I don’t think a women will ever know what it does to a man to see a woman cry. I could flip over a building, slaughter an army, or even wrench away a soul from death’s grip for her. However, what she needed wasn’t my efforts, but my presence. This was the simply beauty of our friendship as it was all we could give. She wailed, lamented, and mourned. As the cathartic writhe, she was really and truly alive. She was mourning out her days, and what a beautiful an honorable thing it was for her. I took doses of her pain as I could bear them. I thought to be so far from home to send money back, only to find that your worthy recipient was no more. I looked down on her prostration next to that smooth river as I locked in this moment within my mind. This was one of those few that I would ever have. I thought to break of a piece of the stump that she cried on, but recalled I would be missing the point. I valued the being there, not what it produced. A life passed, and then she stood up. I hugged her as I whispered in her ear “con dios, con dios.” I took her to her house where she insisted on cooking me a meal I can’t recall what it was called. In the giant swathes of the human experience I don’t understand, she seemed to revel in it. She was here to mourn out what was, and then to be back where that mourning put her. She never wished for otherwise than that which she had. We sat and ate the meal. I commented on her vest. She smiled a real and sincere smile that made up for a thousand acted ones. The vest came from her grandmother's Alapacas and she knitted it herself. She then told me stories of her family, of which I understood somewhat. In it were stories that led to nowhere or storylines that were unresolved. The wedding her grandmother would never attend, the funeral she could not make, the children never to be held and kissed by those arms and lips. In this, the unrealized and unrequited ironies of that which we wanted most not administered took second place to boldly being that thing she was. If God is good and gracious to me and I am able and laborious, I will someday attain a proportionality of the magnanimity of her soul. Here are two stories. They are so different and have all these little threads that go nowhere. Do you wish for me to resolve them and bring it all together? You should know by now that I am not that good of a writer, but more than that, this is a practice in being with, mourning, and blessing those things that never come to pass.