Monotony creates illusion. While some people escape through alcohol and some people escape through sexual fantasy, many more escape through the monotony of their stoic unchanging everyday existence.
You've got your 9 to 5, then home by 6, in bed by 8, up by 6... (to quote the Loft).
An illusion of life is a life not worth living.
I sit on a grandma couch with floral pattern in a garage over-run with old prints behind cracked glass, charcoal grills, baskets of laundry, and even more furniture. Rain has been steadily washing over the roof above me and the concrete in front of me is releasing a steam from the warmer half of today. The leaves of giant trees droop a dark green and sway with the weight while a thin fog lingers 30 feet into their limbs. And I feel alive. I feel like I've shed another skin of numbness, as I so often do. I live for things that shake my ever wandering perception of reality. Every so often something real (for lack of a better word) grabs me like a child eager to show his parents a new discovery, and drags me back to meaningfulness.
My cigarette ash is as drawn out as my thoughts. My Rice Krispies are singing with the rain. Time that has been steadily marching forward for an eternity has slowed to a casual saunter as if to take in every moment that is happening, in every life, at every time of day, all across this earth. It reminds me of all the people I know in different time zones, countries, and continents. I wonder what they are doing at the very moment I type these words. I wonder what they are thinking. I wonder who they are with, what they are feeling. "When was the last time they thought of me?" I muse. And I pray for their well-being. All of this puts me in my place. Small, in that I am only here: at one point in geography and at only one point in time, in any given second (and those are only moving forward, never in reverse). But as small as I am, what infinite possibility I have been given to speak with the creator of time and space who, being bound by neither, can reawaken the hearts of every companion I thought of before. Just like my heart. Just like this moment. But with moments that are as different and individual as each one of them. I am confident He hears and follows through with my pleas for my fellow hearts in every hemisphere.
A late sun is breaking through the clouds and the trees as if to seal this epiphany, as cliche and tired as it may have been. I remember in high school my football coach spoke an unwittingly relevant truth. He said something of how rain forges events in our life into our memories. They become carved into our reality. Today is the furnace carving a memory to live by tomorrow. One second at a time. Until I need to shed another skin.
