Tacenda

I worry a lot that I'm going slowly insane and the people around me are being to polite to tell me. I mean how would I know? I tell myself that the truth is important. More important than emotional security and happiness, certainly.

But what is truth?

The truth is that I am alive and awake, right here and right now, blogging away, posting my pretentious, self-righteous thoughts on the Internet because some people didn't wake up this morning.

Sometimes we are truly immortal and nights will last forever and choices will not ultimately matter. Until they do. Until those trees will no longer be climbed, fields unexplored, forts unbuilt, the Summer of every yesterday frozen in amber, dimming in the crush of hours. Of mundane time. Of life happening over and over. A copy of a photograph of someone else, so very many years past.

Sometimes there are no patterns. Sometimes hope must coexist with sorrow, sometimes the truth is nothing more remarkable or heartrending or prosaic than 'this happened.' The child that we were and the adult we became and the person that we tell ourselves that we really should have been are all standing at the end of an abandoned road, in dimming light, looking up, demanding meaning. Scrying first cloud, then star, then storm, until the rain washes the world clean of tears and regret and unanswered and unanswerable questions.

This happened. Choices were made and actions were taken and it was not the end of the world. The sun rose and birds sang and alarm clocks blurred into time clocks. And there is no greater intent to be assigned.

Yesterday became today and the world didn't end. But two worlds did. One amber day in the early 1990's has two fewer bicycles, two fewer pocket knives, two fewer adolescent voices arguing about baseball and sex and video games. Wise and immortal as only twelve-year-olds can be.

Best Friend is truly the greatest honor one human being can bestow upon another, and Best Friends the purest relationship, void as it is of the insecurities and dishonesty inherent in romance or familial bonds. That fading amber moment may only exist in a single head now, but it was pure and beautiful and magical in a way that so very many things in this world are not.

Some days the world is stark and cold and uncaring. Some days two best friends will be murdered in their sleep over such mundane bullshit as money and drugs. And the child will demand meaning and intent and answers. And find none. The sky remains unyielding, it's secrets kept, a fortress unassailable to plea and prayer, threat and tear.

Two of the best friends I ever had were murdered. Choices were made and actions were taken and worlds were ended. This happened and will have always happened.