All it takes are a couple well executed ideas and beautifully illuminated sunset clouds for hope to spring forth again. I am young, I am elastic, and my ability to skip and hop and play should not be taken for granted. I can’t touch my toes. I used to pride myself on flexibility and yet every morning I tell myself I need to stretch. Often I forget to do much more than reach down to be dismayed by my lack of progress.
I must not give you the wrong impression- the fact that I’m only concerned with my inability to touch my toes should be considered a huge improvement in my personal life and times. It’s a happy time of life. One that I am willing to face, knowing full well all my deficiencies, expecting the best.
As I sit down and write, I am forced to reflect on how slowly this piece comes to my mind– how my typical self-pity was a much more effective writing partner. It is much harder to treat hope seriously. The threat of a “melodrama” classification holds back words or phases that might more accurately describe my state of mind. But I find that only has the effect of when I walked into a gallery labeled “anti-Raphaelites” (their movement, Pre-Raphaelite) whose art was supposed to be a rejection of the overly flowery and unserious art of Raphael, that to me, these anti-paintings looked more like Raphaels than the ones I had seen.
The sublime and the grotesque, the romantic dichotomy of aesthetics, (and you must forgive me that I didn’t pay enough attention in Theatre History: I to find an inverse of the melodrama genre, I don’t mean to lose that thread, I only have so much to give to these pieces) is plainly reflected to me in the average urban life. The quiet mornings in solitude, hearing what limited range of birdsong is offered, tending to the window-side plants. Then leaving the home each commute and finding the singing birds matted feathers, and the cigarette butts, and littered lottery tickets. And for some reason, and I believe it must be the shift out of the summer heat the trash and the sometimes smell and the acidic city life have given me such energy you would think they were a clear blue body of water.
The last the dog days brought some meaningful change of mind. No epiphany, but we’re post-modern here, we know epiphany doesn’t exist in the way we’ve been told it does. Nevertheless I have crossed off the first serious item off my bucket list, I started to long for ways to get out of my house each day, I practiced a flow-esque focus at work. And sometimes I find myself praying for the first time in half a decade.