Bed of Roses: September 2012

Trapped in hell and given the chance of escape, most would take the ticket out.

Few would stay behind to hold your hand or to hold to their promises. Most you would see slowly leave, fading from the scene over time, till all you're left with is a dial tone. Others you will watch turn and wave goodbye at the end of the street, smile at you as they open the door to the drivers seat or look back a last time before they board a bus and you know from those polite gestures you'll never see them again.
You'll know from those tears in the hall, the eyes that don't meet yours, that kiss on your forehead what betrayal means.
Its nothing personal.
Those who left did so out of self preservation, not because you are unworthy or unlovable but because cruelty is merely weakness, love a matter of convenience. Our lives are ruled not by heroic novels, our impulses not by altruism but by natural selection.
Some evolve while others are left behind.

So it was with the elderly and the demented who were my constant companions through the underworld I was left in, they were an oracle to a future most of us one day will experience.
Face to face with your own mortality is a very lonely, desolate terrain. Polarized from the ones you loved, exiled from the past, tied to a future on the horizon: images of chronic disease and disability. An existence serving an indefinite sentence one of solitude and isolation.
Left to depend on the kindness of others knowing the more vulnerable the more abused and exploited.

I will never forget those left behind, the dead, the chronically ill, the psychologically distressed and disturbed, the demented; tied to beds, drugged, ignored, punished in cold tiled bathrooms, electrocuted; the humiliation, degradation, the ambient loneliness. Treated without respect to human dignity as if the infirmed are void of human emotions or sensibilities.
I remember the same miserable condition of wings being clipped indefinitely. I know the same almost childish fear and powerlessness like the lights in a house shutting off one by one and not wanting to be left alone in the dark.

Between convalescence and deteriorating health, I remember helplessly watching the same small sphere of stolen moments of happiness diminish in the absence of friends, lovers, family. And it remained a mystery to me how quickly fortune can change hands, how the bond of friendships, of love are made redundant. How forgetting came so easy.
It shattered my heart how the value of a human life could become insignificant.
How consigned in a small cell of a room life could go by, the seasons come and go not knowing you ever existed.

But there Darwin took my hand and his sand walk became my only comfort.
Together we walked the same path: from an embryonic cell to a creature intrinsic to the experience of pain, along the struggle of our existence. He too had lost dearly to the survival of the fittest but understood that natures savagery is necessary to our species evolution.
Its nothing personal. Some thrive, while others are left behind
But I know left on that precipice nothing seems worse than abandonment, despondent staring out the window from a wheelchair, confined to bed, living from painkiller to painkiller, imprisoned in a biological atrocity but with Darwin there was no longer any need to ask why or search for meaning once I understood that despite whims, pleas, bargains, and compromises fate is ultimately out of our hands.

Yet it was in loosing meaning, in existential crisis that I could begin to rebuild my concept of the world. To find beauty even in the most deprived of circumstances by realizing the essence of meaning is found in each moment of existence, in the wonder that we exist on this plant at all; a species, alive, pulsating, breathing. Able to evolve from cosmic dust, a molecule, to be given the chance to love and be loved in return.

From the future I have seen I can promise you, you will be alone in the end but I can also promise your survival instinct, hope and imagination will fight for you. They will become your courage, your secret strength, your new best friends and they wont leave you till its your time to go. They will replace those dear to you whom in a novel world would be sitting on your bedside telling you to be brave, making you laugh, making you forget how ill you are.
When you're left in that deserters dust, in the debris that was once a life I promise you hope's hand will intertwine yours. Imagination will turn a mausoleum of pain into a sanctuary; warm arms to cradle you when abandoned to the eery calm of crisp white hospital sheets. And your will to survive will use the last breath in your body to keep you from disappearing into a void, into the darkness, into an existence that no longer matters.

Courage will remind you life is ephemeral nothing lasts forever; not love, not friendship, not life, not even pain..simply some are marked for death others marked for life.
It is nothing personal.

I remember the landscape of those windswept autumn evenings as I sat alone, terrified. The same view in spring from my hospital bed. I remember the longing; longing for the the place you told me you would take me when I recovered. Though the lights of the amusement park sparkled in my horizon it was always across the world for me, always out of reach. Like an enchanted world in a glass globe I could only dream about.

But a miracle was granted, a year later in September slowly I began to recover.

At first I was hesitant, afraid to go back there, alone; without you. But I was determined my life would not be ruled by fear. That it would not be terrorized by illness or medical institutions and not by heartbreak.

I wanted to go back because it would mean I never gave up, I never gave up despite everything I lost, the dream to live again.

I wondered half amazed through the grounds of the amusement park. The rides had been closed but the gift shops and cafes though nearly deserted were open.
With the cool shadow of the roller coaster and space shuttle at my back I sat at at the cafe's terrace still illuminated by the warm rays of autumn, an order of hot chocolate and cinnamon roll shared absentmindedly with the unabashed sparrows ruffled on my table.

I knew where you would have taken me the picture was always a postcard in my mind; the late afternoon sun still golden on that rocky hill outside the fair, far above the distant city in our view. Just as beautiful as you had said.

I would have sat with your hand in mine snuggled up to your duffle coat.

Now I had to be content with having survived the year, without you.