I remember some vague explanation from my father about a "tricycle" and a "car," but the explanation for these features is lost in time. However, as my hairline recedes and my age increases these small flaws have become more and more evident.
I wonder how many stories we carry around, written into our skin and bones-- maybe etched chemically into our nerves or other tissue-- that really belong to someone else? The events happened to us, but they are not ours. We are just the book on which they are written.
Someone else has the guilt, the knowledge, the text of the story, but they keep it on a private shelf-- hidden. Part of us knows that the story is there, but the gap left by its absence can never be filled.
We are told it doesn't matter.
I am sure they are correct.
All the accidents of fate that lead to our existence-- the family bible thrown on the fire, the friend with an ex-girlfriend in Kansas, the intoxicating smile of the intense girl in the youth group (eyes burning behind her glasses, the curls of her hair framing her face), the cramped existence in an apartment in a sleepy, coastal town-- these really don't matter. Or they matter most to someone else.
Someone else who wishes to forget them.
The plan, after all, was freedom. Freedom from the expectations of one's parents. Freedom from the constraints of dress. Freedom from the shallowness of the empty, social club religiosity of our youth. Freedom from urban life and its insults to the senses and sensibilities. Freedom to be ourselves and to travel that journey of self-discovery. Freedom to be intoxicated by our own ability to be influenced by and influence others. Freedom to associate in groups and take on their ways or have them take on yours. Freedom to make mistakes along the way.
There was a clear intention: to be happy, to be fulfilled, to experience the warmth of human companionship along the way.
So many things muddled this clarity. So many compromises were made.
Some people speak of making a deal with the devil, but entering into a contract with an angel can be just as constraining. Both require that in some way you make your life about duty and obligation and you part ways with your soul. Your soul is still there, of course (loyal companion)-- it just lives the life of a dog kept out in the cold.
The fact of life is that it forces itself upon us, unbidden. It does not need our permission. It emerges from the cracks in the universe and makes itself real. We are not required to understand.
There is never a point at which our story is our own. It always belongs to someone else. To something else. It is a voice to a universal phonograph-- a needle and a spinning wheel to play someone else's notes.
And as much as we play, we were played. But we resist the forces that shape us and so the music is discordant. We aspire to be more and in doing so we are less. The aspiration never reaches fruition because it is not in its nature to do so. Its nature is to self-perpetuate. It is a solvent, like water. It forms only to transform.
The story of aspiration is not our own. It is the same yearning as that of our ancestors and we are the new aperture through which that light can escape and project itself on the world.
That is what we feel when we are drawn in by necessity to love and attachment and the incessant withdrawals on our time and emotions-- that larger yearning. The aspiration is never concluded. Part of its modus operandi is to give birth to itself again, each time with the illusion of newness. The central lie is "individuality," and yet our individuality is never entirely our own.
In a sense it is infuriating to see some part of ourselves (but not the part that is our own) born in front of us, under our care but out of our control, living free and undermining our own chances to achieve that end goal. It is infuriating to feel some empathy for our parents and how one's own existence must have drained their own sense of control and attainment. Their standards were appropriately high and yet they have no control over the true outcome. The legacy? The surrounding society? The aspirations of their own children? All are dashed on the prow of fate like waves in choppy water. The aspiration of our ancestors took one form and seemed so solid and yet it melted away like a spider's web, like the body of a spider consumed by her young.
The mother's body never satisfies. We always need more.
When accidents intrude to erode our sense of self-control-- horrible accidents-- we are startled to hear their message of impotence. They slice through our sense of self-absorption like shark teeth through the soft hide of a seal and leave us with a gash in our self-importance. Such things are best patched up and forgotten. The lesson they give is so painful and self-contradictory. They spawn visions of possibilities, some of which threaten our view of ourselves as a good person, some of which speak to our pain and regret, some of which wish the noise of the world could just die down and leave us alone. We are challenged in our capacity to absorb, accept and adapt. We are challenged to accept our good fortune as just that-- the best possible outcome-- and not to wish things had turned out differently.
After all, a life change is sometimes easier to deal with if it takes a different form. It depends on how it chooses to arrive as much as what it is. The end of a relationship is so different when based on infidelity as opposed to an irrevocable loss or an unavoidable illness. This is because we live in story-- the story we tell ourselves.
In addition, sometimes accidents begin to seem like they had an underlying intention. Maybe we brought them about unconsciously. Maybe we wanted free, but couldn't admit it to ourselves. Now we have that guilt to carry for the rest of our lives. But as long as no one else knows.... There is the official story and there is the story we tell ourselves. Now our soul is two dogs and they fight each other and both live out in the cold.
And sometimes we pay for our love of life. It is intoxicating to be alive and young and exposed to so many possibilities. We cock the gun and spin the wheel and play the numbers and we are lucky-- so lucky. So what's the problem? She spins the wheel and, "Bam!" The shot reverberates through the rest of our life. There was some fundamental miscalculation about the nature of existence and what factors determine outcomes and their differing weight with differing subjects and so forth... we couldn't have known. That makes it better, right?
Let's try to rewrite this story. Let's start over. Let's go be pioneers in our own existence. Except there is no frontier. The frontier is gone. We have already been there. It was never there to begin with.
The angel's wings will fold over us and hide us from these truths, but even angels grow tired and eventually let down their wings. The mortal sky shines down on us once again.
Okay then-- let's just ignore the cracks. We will not acknowledge the fissures. We will not face the things that have happened, that we may have done or neglected to do. It is our own story after all-- we can claim it and keep it under lock and key.
And all the time our story wanders about the earth, infuriating us with its lack of communication, its defiance of norms and refusal to stay in one place. All the time it never was our own. It belonged to something bigger and it found a way out.
Maybe the fissures in my head tell me that we are all accidents in some sense-- I am fortunate to carry these marks in my skull and be alive. The story they tell is mild compared with many. I have no real deficits to complain about. My story will not finish with me. It will not culminate in anything that I achieve. It is not my own. It is like water and it desires more than anything to create new cracks in this reality, apertures through which it can flow, wheels it can turn and songs it can sing until the song of all humanity is over.
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