“They say that all my friends are going to be strangers” – Danny O’Keefe 1970s
Another Christmas now past and caught in the well between holidays. Dog days of mixed emotions effected mightily during these time by memories of one’s perpetually lonely long ago past. Tough times are hard upon professional loners. A career that no one willingly chooses. But one that is foisted upon them by some long ago unanticipated trauma of unfortunate events. So natural for the human animal to protect one’s self when greivously wounded as a child. To be ever on guard and watch for the possibility of further harm. Not totally uncommon for much ot the population of the planet. Yet when the family is fractured internally one finds only themselves to turn to for solace.
Not anybodies fault perhaps? Just circumstance that more than most, one might imagine, must deal with. Some much better than others. The stains and wrinkles of a perpetually tormented social structure causing rifts that embroil all. Friendships come and then at some point fester. All manner of causes cited! So many try to build a temple of mortal flesh around man and woman but forget the bond of family and matrimony as the highest virture. No matter how it may interfere with the larger appreciation of the present. Little if any time available to reflect on one’s own true identity together and make that the most golden and impermeable. The interloper of politics for the better of society imposing every measure at it’s disposal to interfere.
An so when one experiences a flat within this illusory version of a land of infinite plenty the breakup is solemn and swift. It is only at the interval of that imposed fiction of years passing in the category of time and age that one comes to rest to wonder at what has happened to them and the history of their earthly existence overall. So many faces whose names now escape one to be retagged and sorted by influence and overall importance. How one was once elated and one was once hurt. Keeping score as a matter of survival in terms of who one might be able to count on in some future trauma. And who one might be able to forgive if that other neglects to come to one’s aid.
The score card summarily tallied and other replacements found. Though the whole process of trust and sharing one’s self having to be gone through yet again. Something so casual and effortless in youth, so flawed and ponderous in later age. One cannot help at a certain point to be so wearied that one’s own commitment is tarnished by doubt. Perhaps the result is no longer worth the effort? That it might be just as well to content one’s self with the empty drudgery of abiding only one’s self with that tennuous inner comfort of ‘peace of mind’?
How sad to measure the epiphanies of long ago ‘first’s! Those times and events when all experience seemed fresh and exciting and full of promise. And then to measure the paltry amount of dust by comparison on the other side of the scale? The real cause of death possibly found to be one’s sense of emptiness and futility in terms of what one has been left with in the ‘now’ of so many impossibly far away years of now. The checkmate of one’s better emotions worn thin like bad rubber by the pot hole riven road of life. A test of character for one to rise above same and somehow succeed if only for a few precious moments.
This then is the gauntlet of annual holiday celebrations. Those three ghosts haunt all expecting them to answer with some form of action that persistently quizzical question of how to further move forward? The enigmatic veil of life’s continuum offering no definitive answer beyond the willingness to once again engage in trial and error and attempt to be satisfied with the results. An perhaps after same. put all one’s former demons to rest for good?