Now Playing: Donnie Darko - The Soundtrack
Topic: My mind's attic
"I find it kind of funny, kind of sad
that the dreams in which I'm dying
were the best dreams I ever had."
(from a song I heard in a movie..)
Naturally, as the serious side of age sets in and slows your footfalls, you start thinking less about taxes and more about the other certainties. Ok, so I never really thought about taxes, especially not as a forgone conclusion. And so much of my past life seems still rather close at hand, as if it only happened a week, or a month ago, that thinking about the ultimate inevitability may appear foolish.
Still, I've always argued that in order to live you must be mobile, both in mind and body, and able to remain curious. There are plenty of folks out there who can do all three even though they - literally - cannot move a muscle. Good for them, I wish them all the best from hereon-after. I will never be one of them. And although most of my muscles are surprisingly intact, almost as if they survived in spite of my living, I truly am immobile. I could not be more paralyzed if you gagged me and bound me into a broken-down wheelchair.
The absence of curiosity about tomorrow and the year or century thereafter leaves you transfixed, unable to move, and forever looking back at yourself; with each passing moment your inner eye paints ever more glorious pictures of the past, until it can be recognized by no-one but yourself. Until one day you appear to be waking up, it need not be morning in your mind, and you cannot help but ask yourself if you did not simply dream it all!? Did you really ever meet J., and K., and C.? Did B. truly exist as the unabashed genius you seem to remember her? Were R. and D. actually men seemingly large than life, as the saying goes? Did you indeed traverse continents and oceans passing through cities and wastelands without ever having a destination?
The scars, both outside and in, seem to confirm the tales. What is missing, though, is the ultimate proof: a legacy, no matter how small or insignificant, that would remind someone, somewhere, of a life without regrets.
And that, friends and enemies alike, I cannot find.
