Stoplight
I used to be a Harvard man; my mind weaved in and out of school work and I found myself always trapped within some type of study or some type of abstract.
I went to school for psychology with the crazy dream of becoming one of the greatest existentialists out there. Yet I find myself here, frozen. This could be one of the longest red lights I've waited through in my life, watching irritably for any opportunity to make my move across the street. I begin to think of all the things I've been blessed with in my life. The strife my mother underwent in a small southern town that I couldn't quite find my way out of. I've lived a long portion of my life wanting to pursue the kind of lifestyle I saw on television. Big houses, big cars, big money, luxuries only the most prominent of folks could get. But I was at a stop light, just as the man to the right of me was, and just as the girls across the street were as they giggled to the tune of their plastic bags full of whatever emotion it is young girls feel when they spend a load of money on clothes, and just as I would be until fate lent me another green light and I could afford to keep going. I couldn’t keep my thoughts from running forward in full motion, yet they stopped abruptly like an old horse dipping its cracked tongue into water by the side of his path but I lacked even that motivation: the omnipresent evolution of survival that our bodies are designed to embrace once our minds become too sad and decrepit to work anymore, to keep the gears turning until they reach their Goal and then move onwards to the next place postmarked on the mental map. That’s what stopped me.The list was not finite, I couldn’t stop myself from wanting more of me, there was no end, only endless work, and there was no one to stop me or tell me, “That’s enough, you’re working yourself to the bone now, can’t you feel how tired you are? It’s enough now. I promise.” I was alone with the empty joy of money and knowledge and the disturbing reality that I knew nothing of my mother, my only family, and had not for plenty of years because I had been too busy trying to make her proud to look after her wrinkled, careful features and read to her in the damp light of the farm house she made me call home.
It was odd when this thought hit me. Like I had lost a part of me that could still be retrieved, as if it was hovering right above me, but only for an instance, and that if I let that moment go it’d leave me with a shout and I’d have to stand there stupidly with my arms outstretched, grasping at nothing yet watching it all go, like a child accidentally releasing a balloon covered in his birthday cake, one that had become his friend in the way only children can be fond of things. There was a distraction then, I can’t remember quite what, I was too lost in the emotion of what I’d lost yet still had in my grasp, but the girls across the street were no longer giggling with their bags and the man next to me was gone and at that moment i felt as though i lost it all; I was so easily fixated with the boundless highway of thoughts I paved that i was fully unaware of the crackling foundation these thoughts were built on. But just as I had been ejected back into a less symbolic reality one of the girls I saw from earlier unconsciously rammed into me bringing about not only a storm of her over-priced under valued belongings but also a storm of our own life's being warped together; the stoplight acting as a tempest of sorts. I collected her belongings stoically, going through the motions only because survival had kicked in; I looked up only when my body was sure I had done it right, that I was not in danger of getting chewed apart by the fractured skeleton of a man my instincts found so disgusting, only to see the frail outline of a girl with the scent of New York lingering in her hair and with the glow of someone living confidently in the translucent obscenity of luck without any need to desire, hope, or achieve, yet still doing that much with an ounce of grace; the last thing I heard of her was a tentative, “Good Luck,” as if I was being blessed by the Holy Virgin Mary herself, a lost soul being pitied by an ethereal force who just wanted to move on. She was a stampede ramming through my life, with the bestial purpose of reaching her own destiny by tearing me down just to keep up with the rest of her bull-faced crowd, but then I didn’t know it. I observed her with the air of someone utterly lost in affection, but I was more affected by the shock she sent through me and she, herself, stirred nothing in me. It wasn’t that she was beautiful beyond words or that her eyes lit up in a special way: I was still lost within myself, a dark lump of refusal in a body barging through life like an avalanche; but she slowed me down in a way no one else could. Maybe it was the shock of getting a soft suede bag shoved into my groin, the homage of a designer catering to this wealthy humanoid character, and that’s what she was to me. I don’t mean to confuse this encounter with the beginning of a love that broke the rule of time, as if it had transcended through centuries to find us once again and envelope me. But her clean scent and the aura of accomplishment surrounding her coy features kept her in my memory. I saw her just one time, but once I thought I saw the flick of her hair turn the corner quickly, as if a rich girl could ever be in a rush to do anything, but the sway of her hips resembled the ones etched in my memory and I had thereafter seen the same dismembered being of this girl countless times later. I believed she dwelled behind every corner just close enough for me to smell her sweet fragrance. We became two lines, never to intersect again, yet forever conjoined by our one experience, mended together by a single stoplight.
