Life.
Some people would say I haven’t lived. In many respects they’d be pretty accurate. There are a number of venues in life I have yet to experience and many I refuse to experience. Want a list?
I’ve never done drugs (with the exception of caffeine of course).
I’ve never smoked a cigarette.
I’ve never been drunk.
I’ve never broken a bone.
Here’s the kicker, for all my ideas of love and romance, for all the words, poetry and prose I read and write, for all the hopes, I’m ignorant… ignorant, naïve, inexperienced, unaccustomed, and absolutely and totally oblivious to any forms of intimacy. I have never so much as kissed someone in intimacy… yet. Then again, there’s more to intimacy than that.
Still, I don’t think that disqualifies me from the subject of life or love. I think that the honest approach of inexperience is capable of identifying profound truths. A number of philosophers throughout the ages would take issue with that I’m sure, but I’m not writing an essay, I’m writing an opinion. I’m writing an opinion compromised by biases and prejudices and pain and pleasure and a ton of experiences of varying magnitudes of which inexperience is a valid part; in fact, I'd go so far as to say there is no such thing as inexperience, as there is no such thing as darkness. Each only exists as an absence of something else, and in the case of experiences, their absence is often far more beneficial and constructive than their presence. Still, I’m writing the insignificant beliefs, ideas, standards, ‘whatevers' of a twenty-one year old university drop out. Actually, I have plans to drop back in, so that last statement might need amending. Nevertheless, I’m just one person, like everyone else who can still be reached in a one on one context. That isn’t everyone. Ideologies, ‘ism’s, factions, sects, dogmas, I can’t reach those… so that excludes some people who have succumbed to be the embodiment of such generalities.
I’m not knocking sensation, I’m not demeaning reason, I wish I could wed the two.
“Life isn’t all about experiences. There’s a higher purpose and it’s not fortune, it’s not fame, it’s not pleasure, it’s not highs, it’s not lows, it’s certainly not me… it’s you… and it‘s who lives within you.”
That’s what I want to be able to tell Hope. More so, I want to say it honestly. I want to live it. My life could end up being someone's story one day, but I’ll be the first to tell it, but not on paper. The first telling is living. If I speak too soon I’ll only draw a conclusion of hypocrisy.
I’ve sat up with Hope for hours talking about ideas; Life after death, human nature, free will versus determinism, pleasure or pain, nurture or nature, past present and future, I’ve treasured these discussions (arguments), for all that I’ve learned, and all I’ve reasoned, but more than them, I’ll covet the smells, the touches, the glimpses, the tastes, the sounds and the associations I’ve made that lead certain sensations to ignite specific thoughts and evoke particular feelings. I’ve woven a web I love to get tangled in… that I may weave it all again.
I don’t think life should be as complex as we make it. Standards exist, internal and external, and we have to live up to the set we acknowledge. The problem comes in meeting those people that make your present set seem inadequate.
I remember Phil telling me bits of pieces of his childhood, that which he remembered and that which his mother relayed to him, sometimes in a drunken stupor, so the fractured history is hardly gospel truth. He told me stories of men. His mother’s suitors that would call at all hours, show up with flowers and chocolate, and take his mother away… sometimes for days. He grew up feeling like a burden… an inconvenient load that, as a result, was often left behind. I know some people who would say that it was Dungeons and Dragons, or other role playing games that Phil got into during those absences, that killed him. Some would blame the one instance that one of his mom’s beau’s got violent… which is fact, the police have records of the assault that was spawned from ‘too much whining’, first four year old Phil’s and then his mom’s, not the ‘wining’ of the accountant. Phil grew to detest inconsistencies. He hated complications and factors and fractions and numbers and he loved the converging and merging and uniting and bringing together. Phil saw a movie once and had an epiphany… there was this line in it: “Just one thing…”. He took it literally and ever since he worshiped the idea of wholeness. He was active in his worship too.
When Phil met Angelica a whole new set of standards was birthed in him. I’m convinced that when Angelica met Phil she was faced with standards she never knew existed, and when she found out that she was the source of those standards, she was made to feel unworthy to the extent that she hated his purity and devotion towards her. I can imagine that being confronted with love is difficult, especially for those unaccustomed to what love really is. Phil’s last written words to me were ones that have haunted me ever since I’ve managed to put them into an applicable context…
“It’s too much.”
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