My Friends Are Dead

Created: 07/07/2008 02:48:53 AM

My friends are dead. And, of course, I don't judge the dead any differently than the living. Most of us have had the same dreams, the same hopes, the same thoughts of wonder during the frostbitten night. I sometimes find myself back in my room, peering out my window into the snow drifts, moving like desert sands, pausing only when they knew I was watching. The clearest night outside sang a song from the sky, from the stars, with a comet rushing climax, shattering my boundaries, rattling my deepest self with a celestial magnetic current.

But that comet was only for me. And when I saw what I saw, and when I felt what I felt, not a word did I speak. No one likes to be the shortest kid in the class, or the fattest, or the ugliest. If one could keep personal traits in a pocket, safe from all the tunnel-visioned youth, we would all look the same. And I looked the same when I was able.

Horrible dreams make mince of what I had tried to realize. Though my friends had always been ahead of me, pushing out harder, faster, with more ferocity, with leaps and bounds into the responsible world of the successful citizen. My appearance changed so slowly; the same, I'm the same, nothing to offer the window shoppers. It would be nice to have a customer.

And so they drifted away, even the loyal ones; or I left them. They would probably claim the latter. And I would agree with them, until many years later. Many years now when I see them sometimes, come back from the abyss. Sometimes they notice me, but not usually.

We all make a choice at some point. To kill or be killed. To run or stand firm. To carry the stone. And when the time comes, we find out who we are. We find out where we stand.

And I found that I stood alone, with nothing to stand for, and nowhere to go.

Leaps and bounds became inches. The ferocity became hopelessness. The gazers turned to stone. And I turned into a fool, for thinking I would ever be like them; for looking for the flaw in the sapphire; for looking ahead with someone else's eyes. Change washed over us all without effort or action, and it pushed us away, out into the current. And alone in the dark current, I made a frightful discovery....


....I could swim.