Epilogue:

            

                Before me, the receding skyline, the dying strokes of evening behind bitter clouds. Hues of gold and deep gray stream across the night sky in a moment of infinitesimal brilliance—beautiful, and never again to be replicated. Hands in my pockets, that gesture of introverted contentment, and another glance upward. Thoughts momentarily delayed now reform, spurred by the ether of beauty and tragedy above.

                Words—fragile, mortal words—skim along the outskirts of my mind; they question who I am.  They question why I am here. They question the reason behind the vastness of the grass I am standing upon and the sky I am gazing upon, and also the reason of why I am allowed to glimpse such nostalgic beauty but not go any closer. Like a light just beyond my reach, like a dream dancing outside the perimeter of my memory, I fall in love with this transcendent beauty and know that I can never fully have it. I am Orpheus, tortured by the presence of this love and yet unable to grasp it, and the pain threatens to kill me.

                I close my eyes and rest a hand upon smooth, snow-covered tree bark. I let this rapture of mingled ecstasy and grief wash over every core of my being. The splay of gold and gray continues to dance upon my vision. The flow of questions in my mind continues to wrestle with me, but now they are characterized less by words and more by a vague, painful ache inside of me. I do not know what to do with this ache, with this longing for answers and understanding, worth and beauty. I feel this need for these things, and it is an illness without a cure. I am dying…dying…dying from the very need that keeps me living.

                He is standing a short distance away—standing tall and straight, his hands calmly at his side, his face hidden by the shadow of the trees. I can see no part of him clearly, but every part of him fully. He is looking at me, but his gaze seems to go past me and into the questions, into the ache… I watch him watching me and wonder who he is. I watch him watching me and wonder who I am. For some reason, this man’s presence amplifies the nostalgic longing in me, amplifies it to such an extent that I feel I cannot breathe. And I realize that I am dying of this longing…dying not of life but for life.

                Every cry is but an echo of love, says the poet, and I say it to you now. And love is but a farther echo of hate. Every answer raises another question, and every question is in of itself an answer. Life is a glorious gift of deepest pain, a paradox that threatens to be true. Who am I, asks the bard, and I ask it to you now. Who am I? And isn’t it interesting that the answer to “Who am I?” can only be replied with “I am”? In order to say who I am, I must admit that I am. That I exist. That I live. That  there is an “I” of which I am speaking of.

                “Who am I?” You ask.

                To which I reply, “You are.”

Restlessness and Remedies

More and more as I get older, (and I write this at the decent age of 17), I find that I need things that will “take me somewhere”, as my sister and I put it. Things that take me somewhere… I have moments of profound restlessness where all I can do is sit and wait for it to end. I have days where I am flooded by a cruel loneliness, or a deep frustration that I cannot quite identify the cause. It is an illness, perhaps, of a different kind. I find that there are certain cures, however, instruments of grace that turn my restlessness into mystery, my loneliness into solitude, my frustration into motivation. The pain of each of those things is still there, but softed, muted, and countered gently by the effects of the cure. These remedies are music, literature, and nature.

• Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” -Maya Angelou
  Have you ever listened to the Schindler’s List soundtrack? I challenge you to listen to it and tell me that it does not move you. As I listen to the music, the haunting, soft melody and the cry of the violin, something happens inside me. I fade into the background. The music takes over and gives me the courage needed to face one more day. As I listen, some of the frustration and restlessness is siphoned into the flow of music, not being taken away so much as being added onto the melody, another layer of emotion. For me, music is a balm for emotional scars…scars not of pain but of restlessness and deep, unexplainable longing. (\”I Could Have Done More\”–Schindler\’s List)

 

• “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo. And if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to march, to tell, to fight…to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.” -Richard Wright
  Literature is another form of transportation for me. In good, solid literature I find companionship. This is the big thing for me. I love books, I love reading, but not just because it provies me with a nice story, or entertaining characters, or a relatable plot. In literature, I find a shadow–a fleeting glimpse that I catch in rare moments on a page, a glimpse that shows me for one second who I really am. Not only that, but it shows me I am not alone. Words are an echo–my soul gives a strangled cry, which reverberates around the walls of the pages, joins forces with fictional characters and moving dialogue, and comes back to me strengthened, renewed, and just as haunting. Poetry, specifically, does this for me. In Tennyson’s “Memoriam” and Keating’s “On His Blindness” and Whitman’s “Oh Me, Oh Life”…I see my own flaws in these poems, my own doubts embedded in the metaphors, my own longings flooding the careful rhetoric. These poems remind me of my own humanity, and they remind me that there are others out there. I write to see if I am alone; I read to know that I am not. However, it is not only in poetry that I find this comfort–in the epic brilliance of “The Lord of the Rings”, in the haunting faith of “The Book Thief”, in the slow truth of “The Chosen” and “The Promise”, in the lonely cry of “My Name is Asher Lev”, in the mix of joy and regret in “Remembering the Good Times”, in the growth and honesty of “The Outsiders”….all of these things act as a companion for me. When I am surrounded by language–pure, meaningful language–I am no longer alone.

 

 

• “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” -John Muir
  Nature is my last form of transport. Nature is my oxygen mask, in an almost literal way. I joke sometimes that I want to live on a mountain in New Zealand, but I am partially serious. I’ve google imaged the country so many times that I’ve nearly memorized the first two pages of pictures, and I recognize some of the images from random websites displaying beautiful nature. Everyday I let my dog out at 6:30 in the morning. The sun is just beginning to rise, I can catch a pale shaft of light piercing the thick, gray sky, and a little bit of air relieves my soul. I step outside around 7:00 at night and I let the clear, darkening sky and the first emerging stars remind me that there is more to life than what I see. Living in the suburbs of Illinois, nature is a bit subdued–no mountains here, no rivers… On the days where I feel extremely restless, I take out a photography book of amazing nature scenes and I drink them in–rivers of teal and blue, thin trees blanketed in white snow, sand dunes under a bright sun, all of it revives in me a sense of life. All of it provides me with a little bit of air to my choking lungs. Suddenly there is something visibly, tangibly greater than myself, weather I can’t control, colors I can’t change. There are things outside of my control–a normally terrifying thought–and yet it’s okay. They’re still beautiful.