The Big Things

My family goes to sleep when most Europeans wake up.

But time difference has a couple hours to do with that.

Today I’m reading a book who is trying to make me cry. I was close, but I didn’t really get there. It talks of big things. Small things. Everything. But mostly of how the small things are what make people, and the big things are just things people avoid using the small things. Something. Anything.

That stain who refuses to leave his residence on your favorite coat.

Of how you must give it away to someone less appeciative(who will not, for two and a half years, realize that the second-to-last button is blue, while the rest are violet) due to a convicting sermon on the art of being selfless.

How you shouldn’t have eaten so many pancakes at breakfast with an old friend, because now you’ve made your way into obesity statistics.

But then, then people make walls out of these smaller things, and create a labyrinth of stains on their favorite charity coat(and of how selfless one really can be, to leave a stained coat to a ‘Nam vet?), or how they might have liked to fly a kite for the first time since the age of eight had it not been raining today, and the desire to will have dissipated by the time the sun is out. They hadn’t remembered how they had built it though, they never do, and even death cannot lead them to the exit of their own, personal worry maze. It distorts their bodies in their graves, their skin is fed to the Earth, or seemingly evaporates with the worries they had refused to throw against the wind(it’s always so much more fun, as anything will stay airborne longer than if you had thrown it with the wind) by simply buying a kite from a cornerstore and sacrificing it to the sky.

There are small things that do one quite a bit of good, though.

The way those scented markers smelled in kindergarten.

Cherry was always my favorite.

That song with the really awkward synth, and of how you feel embarassed because that lead singer wrote it for a lover who had left him, because she can’t help but regret her decision even less every time she hears it on the radio.

That time you witnessed an infant in a humble red dress hold that string to her very own balloon for the first time.

It was yellow.

You were wearing your favorite coat.

There is comfort, to me, in realizing we will all follow our distinguishable paths, branching out like the roots of some ancient tree, and then die alone.

This means even the accomplished burn out, whether having had flickered like a frail candle before their grave, or leaving like an unexpected guest arrives.

They’re busy a lot.

Don’t be so busy all the time.

October 8, 2008. Uncategorized.