I’ve been alive for twenty-one years. Adults view that as a “blink of an eye” and the universe views it as too short of a time period to notice or notate. Yet in that microcosm, I’ve already met and said goodbye to countless lifetimes; infinite numbers of roads and alleys that I could have traveled to bring me to any point in time but the one I find myself in. I’m not regretting where I am, instead I am uneasy about my failures to observe each road and alley with the knowledge I have now.
The world never turns out to be the way you think it is when you’re younger. There’s an unscripted necessity for continuous evolution within ourselves that I feel everyone experiences, but not everyone identifies. You change your hair, your clothing and your vocabulary. You’re too busy trying to keep everything together that you don’t realize it is in these moments when you are most apart. Some of the people I have met in my life have had an impalpable affect on me. I feel I’ll never be able to fully grasp and channel this affect into anything that I can see, taste, or touch; but I know it’s there.
Maybe this is the furthest I have come to establishing (for myself, if anything) just what it is that keeps me up some nights. All of these roads and alleys, all of these haircuts, and all of the people I have met are my life. They are not what matter most or least to me, they are what comprise the life that I have led thus far. How can I ever become something that shows just how much these eyes have seen?
It’s moments like these that remind me of a lonely old man who lived down the block from my friend Chris. He had a long gray beard and eyes as dark and deep as the ocean. Everyday I’d pass his house to get to Chris’, and he’d be sitting on a chair placed in the middle of his lawn, smoking a long pipe filled with tobacco. Rain or shine, he became a staple of my route to Chris’ house. Chris and I would talk from time to time about the old man, and joke about why he had the most prominent look of defeat in his eyes. Years later, not only have I not spoken to Chris, but I never got to speak to that old man about what those eyes had been through. I drive by from time to time, yet I haven’t seen him outside with his beloved pipe since.
I can only fear the worst.
I think I understand now why that old man looked so defeated. He realized that not only would I never know what he had seen and done in his magnificent time on earth, but nobody else would either; he had no way of finding a place to begin. He knew that his story would go down with him, and maybe that pipe was all he needed to be okay with that.
I’ll never stop trying to become something that I can say is a testament to all I’ve seen, said and done. It scares the shit out of me thinking that it’ll all be a waste. I’m too proud, determined, and maybe even a little arrogant. Maybe I like what I see in the mirror, or maybe my mom spent too much time when I was younger telling me how much I am worth. I’ll never stop trying.
Until then, I suppose I’ll need to find my own pipe.
