I have a Fil paper I didn't even start until a few hours ago. I am exhausted. But I didn't forget. I have a feeling this blog is going to kill me this January.
It was in a blur of vivid colors, in shadows of cigarette smoke, and the fragile memory of drunken nights alone and wandering that he drove from town to town, losing himself in the reality of non-commitment, in the freedom of riding the wind, in doing whatever there was to do and then leaving when there was nothing left to be done. Wherever the current took him, that was where he would go. Why fight something that would never stop pulling. Why fight something as strong and relentless and unforgiving as life, he thought.
It went on like this for awhile. A constant fog of calm sweeping nothingness. It would be late mornings with no promise of breakfast barely transitioning into searing afternoons that dusked into lazy naps and cans of cold-enough beer with strangers who had nothing better to do. Some nights he had the mind to find a nice pool table to hang around, earn his keep, just enough to keep going.
And maybe, you're thinking, a girl will come along, or a life, or a death, or something magnificent to make this man change. He'll see the light, and he'll wake up from the spell that's been his life and he will marvel at all the time he's wasted and all the things he could've done as he looks out into the horizon and the endless possibilities stretched out before him. Maybe he'll die a hero. Well, no, you're wrong.
He stayed in his aftershock of powder blue for the rest of his life, and many came and many went, and maybe along the way, someone made a note to remember him. But mostly people settled to forget. This is what we do, after all, we forget. And it might be important to matter, as some people are naturally able to do, but it was just easier, by and large, not to care.
It's just one thing after the other, these little scratches and dents we make in humanity in the hopes that maybe someday someone will pick up where we've left off and the work goes on, it lives on, and the machine that we live in will be beautiful, maybe. Perhaps.
But to be anonymous and lonely and free. Oh, what a life.
day 5: haze
