The Parabola of Life Goes on

He woke from the sounds of the support boards slowly splitting beneath his bed. He rationalized his lethargy and weight gain as a brilliant antithesis to Bernoulli’s Principle and the reason why he would not invest in an alarm clock since his bed would wake him anyway.

He slipped on his already-tied thrift store sneakers, snaked his arms through the sleeves of his oversize coat, then dabbed some water on his cowlicks. Then, without forethought that current events have prescribed, he walked out the door. He said he was going to walk out that door. Broke at home. On his final warning at work. The day of his wedding. On his deathbed. No matter what, he was going to walk out that door.

He walked carefully down the sidewalk that ran parallel to his parking lot so as not to cause superstitious injury to his mother. The glow of the towering incandescent lights cast a different color from the cars in the parking lot. Though, he set out to find a greater light in the darkness of the world. It was a time where no one was allowed among one another. People shivered from every touch they made and any guttural breath they heard brought panic. The regulated distances wore on people’s feelings of emotional distance. They were dying at a daily rate that exceeded the population of his home town. At numbers so great that that people were numbers, not names.

He had been walking for some time with his forehead down and parallel to the ground. He followed the lead of the shadow cast from the streetlights shining on his footsteps until he could only hear his footsteps on the gravel of a country road. He looked up with his eyes parallel to the horizon and could see only faint lights from farmhouses and transmission towers in the distance. The most comparable silence and setting he could remember was that when his father and Shetland Sheepdog with one ear wilted were at his side. His father’s voice soft and gentle yet it carried one’s spirit across the horizon and lifted one’s eyes to the stars with anecdotes about Mark Twain and Haley’s Comet. The sneeze of his dog redirected his attention to his present open-air isolation. He didn’t have his dog nor his father with him that night, though he knew they must be somewhere—each as some bright star winking at him from the sky. His loneliness was only made more real by the absence of any sound that a human being could make. Such distance falters technology—pleasantly actually. It was pleasant for now he could feel his heartbeat in confirmation of which side of life he stood on. He could now see only the stars in the sky. And he could know in the parabola formed by two continents across an immeasurable hemisphere that he was not alone—that one star could bring the eyes of two friends so far away from one another together to both be looking at it. Together.

He dug the heal of his boot into the gravel just to hear the grind and see the white dust against the sky one last time. He looked up to the sky again and sighed. Just to see his breath blend with the moon. For now, since there was nothing he could see, he relied on every sound to get home. The 2:00 a.m. whistle to the east, the single chime of the church bell at the half-hour to the west, the portly dog crying for love to the north, and the semis splitting the wind on the interstate to the south. Everywhere someone wanting to be somewhere else. Even he. But, this night he would be.

Twenty minutes later, he walked through the grass to muffle his boots, spit on the hinges to muffle the sounds of his spring-rusted tin front door, drank the last drops that barely covered the bottom of the bottle by his desk, and typed these words…

Dear Love,

I address you as one, but you are a many. Many one loves. I held on to what was beautiful and still today. Still in silence. Still in me. There. Another will have passed. Now, this is for you. Regardless of the distance on land and the established distance of heart, for my blood that I love was hurt in this person’s life, the tendons in my chest feel as though they are snaking around my heart haunting me with memories of loss I can feel in ways others can see. I must forgive to let go of the hold they have so they and I can be free. Silence still. Stillness still. Still, as I hold my heart, here. I could reach to remedies I have never reached to before. Instead, I am reaching to gratitude in the auditory memories of the gentle and sincere enunciation of poetry. I am thus reminded of the sincerity of kindness even if it is a distant lighthouse across a foggy bay. When I reach to gratitude, it shows me the way. I am restored by kindness that the give cares not if anyone else sees. I hear the words, “love,” “heart,” and “friend,” and really can feel them as they warmly pass through the soul of my cells. I’ve come home to my heart. You reminded me. You inspired me. Though still, my heart stirred. Here. There is no end to the world, that is why it is round. Life has no end, that is why it is the circle of life. Though I don't know where in the circumference of this all I will be, as someone or something, look up and, when you can’t look up, look in and see. --Love, I guess, Me.

With that, the paper could now go to press, the undertaker could put bread on his table for his family, and, at the lectern, it was time for someone else to take the turn to say, “Life, though never the same, goes on.”