Out of the Frying Pan

Out of the Frying Pan

“Give me your hand.” 

“Fire!” the words slipping from my dream, leaving one eternity for another.

I don’t know what I was thinking, perhaps I wasn’t. Sometimes we do things with no concern for our own safety. Most often though, we recognize the danger involved in an act, and take a few minutes to weigh the consequences. It is that time, that few seconds, minutes, hours, sometimes days, even weeks, that we place our internal debate, where anyone walking down the street, can see it. They can see both sides, our rebuttals, our feints, our disastrous insinuations about what might, could, should not happen, but do.

That is the way I feel this morning as the sirens sound, the phone rings, the tornadic voices start screaming, as I look out the window. The morning is nice. I don’t usually pay much attention to the sky, or the sunrise, mainly because I am normally in a different world at that time of day. The sun is usually getting ready to retire about the time I return to my world. This morning for some reason I get up with just a few hours of being absent, walk out on the balcony and notice how blue the sky is. How white the few clouds are. How soft the wind feels. How bad the mosquitoes are at 7:00 AM. 

I feel as if I have been awakened by the gentle sensation of a hand from the future. I can see it reaching from out there and with the beckoning gesture of an index finger, luring me to view a future, I could never have imagined. 

I drink my usual two, three, cups of coffee, turn on the news, a bad habit I have developed over the years. The news is boring as usual. “The world is coming to an end, people are idiots, life will end on Armageddon Day, December 13^th, at noon.” I look up at the sky to make sure I haven’t missed some preliminary event that might tip me off to the possibility, that I will quit my job, buy an orange robe, shave my head, learn a few chants, and head for the airport.

By then the hours have slowly drifted by. I look at the skyline, or what I can see of it. I live in Brooklyn in a high rise, so I have a view of Manhattan, the bridge, and the sky, broken only by a few doves that are permanent fixtures in my world. Something about doves that make me think of eternity. 

After wandering around in my mind, looking at the trees just beginning to get ready to shed their dignity and prepare for the nakedness of winter, I walk back into the building, climb the stairs, and stop to contemplate the chance that one day, they’ll find me dead on the steps, from heart failure. I go into the kitchen, and that’s when it begins. It is like a crank handle being turned, a dial being twisted, music fills the world, and then the plane that hits the towers jumps from the tube, and freezes my heart.

Something happens in that time, when you die before you die. It allows you the opportunity to appreciate, what is left. Not surprisingly what is gone, but what remains to discover. Perhaps it is because we are at the bottom, and there is no place to look but up. But perhaps it is just a nudge that awakens us from the comatose state of apathy, that comes from living and attempting to do little more than survive. You no longer have time to notice happiness has taken the bus for the coast, the other coast, and we are left standing on the street eating a chemically laden hot dog and wondering why.

It dawns on me. I’ve been a sliver of a moon, not even my moon. Somebody is out there pretending to be someone like me, pretending to be someone like them. I decided it is time to buy a ticket and follow a road, not that road, because at that time you don’t know there is a, that road. But you are bored, the burr under your saddle turns out to be hemorrhoids, and the moon is doing little more than catching contemporary wishes and providing the faint glow of a night light.

It is easy to look back on life. It is what we do. We have learned what baggage to leave behind and which to take. But looking forward is frightening, we might just find something we are hoping for, and not even remember we’ve been looking for it. It is in that time of surprise, watching that hand reach from the smoke, that it begins to make sense.

You see the flames, and all they do is make you laugh.  You are frightened, so you consider crying to relieve the possibility of it all being impossible, and yet you feel yourself capable of being you, for the first time.

Fear and hate, are what they are.  Love is a different kind of emotion.  We are conditioned to accept all other emotions because they are related to things we experience. We begin by crying because of the pain, or as a way to illicit a response to a need, or simply to be annoying. We laugh, we think, we try not to think, we perform as a circus performer for ourselves, and others, as a way of testing our responses. But love, there is no way to test it. It is mysterious, illusive. It has been spoken about, sung about, and chiseled into tree trunks and spray painted on the subway walls. It lives in the alleys, it lives on the roof tops, but it lives only, because we need it to.

Unlike fear, it does not come naturally. We do not expose ourselves to injury or death, just to feel the emotion of sadness or grief. We do however realize we have no way to solicit love, as it must be built like one builds a wall, a brick at a time. Many experiences combine to produce what we have been unable to adequately put in words, because we don’t understand love as an emotion. Falling down and skinning your knees elicits anger, fear, or pain, but it does not conjure the notion of love, because love is not rooted in physicality. It is the ether that looms on a horizon, invisible but we know it is there.

That fall day, as the smoke rolled from the buildings that were no more, now only apparitions of a bad dream I am forced to confront, a part of me dies. My chore, being the building of a mechanism that will transport time to a level of acceptance, even after I realize, time is irrelevant. 

Birds singing in the trees, the sky void of planes, yet the ocean continues to be courted by the moon, and the sun cajoled the night to remain, for just a minute more. The stars cry and planets turn their backs on the madness, leaving me alone with my thoughts of life, and the possibility it could continue as it once was, before the maniac showed up screaming that he is murdering people, so that his God can live.

It was the insanity of love, hate, and misconstrued idealism that made the light seem less bright, the darkness even darker than the view from the hole in the ground. The power of hate challenging love, that seems lost. It stands alone, watching, pretending it is still necessary, because without it there can be nothing worthwhile. It finally stands, opens its arms and ushers in the souls that need to leave, to make room for the ones that have arrived. They nod to each other in recognition that time is passing, and things change in some ways, but not in others.

They walk, some crawl, some do not move at all, but the ash continues to rain on our new world. We look to the sky for strength and find only blue sky, which is a surprise, but actually it is refreshing knowing not everything has died.

They come in red trucks, spouting ladders and hope, as they climb into buildings that are no longer there, now, just a picture on a wall in an office across town, the new sky line void of… and yet we find that our memories are better at remembering than we could have imagined, just a lifetime ago. 

Someday when the birds find the sky again, the oceans caress the beaches, and a child puts a penny in the machine and the gum balls keep falling from its world despite all the pockets being full, I hope we can forgive one another for not caring, until it was too late. 

I have found something in being lost, lost something, in being found, and no matter the skinned knees and bruised ego, life goes on, like I never existed. All I can do as a means of redemption, is to say, I love being here with you.