Overlooking the Strand

One day, that happened to be the two hundred and first anniversary of Bastille Day, I was chatting with a friend. Overlooking the area surrounding the Strand, we were submerged in the questions that unexpectedly occupied our consciousnesses in the way nothing short of total. Our conversation lead to an insight into a peculiar truth found in the lives of some adults.

I was told a story that I thought I’d share with you here. My friend’s story is of the approximately following content:

When  I was a wee lasdsie, I didn’t know I was going to die one day. That’s why I could laugh. That’s why I could play. Then I grew up and was told that I was going to die one day. That’s when my laughter started turning into anxious giggling. Overshadowed by the knowledge about the future, the embryo of my smile was destined to a half-aborted life.  I wasn’t able to laugh freely anymore. I was leading a life robbed of the gleam I once knew. I was a young lasdsie at the threshold of maturity and I found a lot of things to be funny. But I wasn’t sure anymore if my responses to them could be called laughter. Names did not mean anything anymore anyway. That was supposed to be comforting. But it wasn’t.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with nature. When duties and all the fun I had allowed, I’d run like a wild wind across the valleys whose hard surface whispered of the marshy layers underneath.  That reminded me of the days when I was learning how to read-write. Because it happened in the spatial time similar to the hidden boggy strata that’d be tickling my feet years after the mystery called alphabet occurred. I learned how  to love nature while I was working on my computer. Because it made me forget what I had learned previously. I thought it was comforting.

I became an adult by reaching the age when one could not be called either a child, or an adolescent, or a young adult anymore. I thought it was enough to start a new stage in one’s life. And it was, in a way. Because I got a job. As an employed person, I could do many things that I couldn’t when I didn’t have one. Many things, except feeling the grass playing with my smelly toes.  Except swimming in the subterranean lake of my youth. Except rowing down the mind-blowingly fast mountain river of my puberty. Except diving into the depths of the heights of my embryo sky.

But I can travel and see the parts of the globe that only a well-paid job can ensure. Mine does it.  It also provides me with means to keep my state-of-the arts technology updated and to sustain cutting edge aesthetics in my apartment, which I, actually, own. One of my cars is exemplary of the modern day crossbreed between poetry and  space-craftsmanship. The other is like an orphan that grew up on the street and was later adopted by a sickly rich family, which is to say that it features the virility of a survivor and easygoiness of a spoilt adoptee. The former I drive when friends invite me for dinner to fancy restaurants. The latter when I think I’d go to the country and then change my mind and visit a new mall instead.

In the mall I usually spend the whole day and leave miserable because a day has only 24 hours that happen to coincide with opening hours of the stores in the mall. I always leave craving more hours. I can’t stand short days, although they all have the same number of minutes. I need more of those Cronos’s increments in order to spend more time at the place where I end up having changed my mind.  Because it helps me memorize new names. It helps me remember which curtain to buy and what kind of sofa matches my armchairs. It helps me keep my thoughts organized. My schedule neat. My stuff sufficient. It helps me forget what I once learned. And to live with the awareness of having forgotten it.