Your name tasted like dark chocolate as it rolled off of my lips.
Bitter. Bitter with desire. Bitter, because it was leaving. Bitter because it made me miss you. Bitter, because for a moment’s time, it was gone.
But sweet. Sweet with euphony. Sweet, because it was yours. Sweet because it embodied everything about you. Sweet, because I couldn’t say it without smiling.
Sweet, because dark chocolate’s our favorite.
Each and every atom in my body was aligned in her direction. She was a foreign language I lusted over. I wanted her smiles, her laughs, her touches, her breaths, her lustrous beauty, her theater of expressions. I wanted to be like the air she breathed; that unnoticed, yet that essential, that vital. I craved her presence each night, I wanted her beside me, as intimate as two pages of a closed book.
But for now that book remains unfinished, and so it remains open. I can’t shake this feeling. I don’t intend to. I know I met her for a reason. I don’t know what it is yet. I may not tomorrow, either. But I will one day.
The cognitive ability to dream is among the most transcendental, nonpareil privileges bestowed upon us as humans. One that’s often taken for granted. Dreams can be beautiful, beautiful experiences; illusory escapes from reality, states of superior sentience, sources of unprecedented insight. But to dream is also to be at one’s most vulnerable. Because who’s more proficient and better-equipped to destroy you, than yourself? They can metamorphose into night terrors within seconds, inflicting levels of affliction very few parts of the waking world can match. For as long as you’re asleep, at least.
Dreamers of the night wake by dawn only to be disappointed (and on occasion, relieved), realizing what they believed was real was no more than a mere fabrication of the mind. But dreamers of the day belong to a class of their own. Of our own. As intelligent beings, there’s an intrinsic, sui generis sense of control we experience when daydreaming. While there is no conscious ability to intervene or manipulate the events that transpire, we do influence them. And we do so with open eyes.
There’s a magic in dreaming while the sun’s still out. She was that magic.
She was like the last twenty-two seconds of a song I never wanted to end. Unlike anything I’d heard before. Especially not like the trash that frequents the radio. There were no lyrics; at least not ones I could discern. Just a mellifluous musical denouement. She was as infectious as the riffs of a pop song, but possessed all the class and composure of a classical composition. As intricate as a piece composed by Liszt himself, as haunting as Chopin’s twenty-one nocturnes, as sublime as Beethoven’s fifth. He was her favorite.
She was mine.
There she stood across the room, a meager five feet tall. Her hair fell much like the way snow did in winter. Flawlessly.
Was that her?
Of course it was, I’d seen photographs. It had to be.
But why was my heart racing? Almost tachycardic. Skipping beats in protest of my hesitation.
Open the door, you don’t have all night.
Her eyes widened as she looked up at me. Her face brightened; not like a child’s on Christmas morning, no. But as our eyes met for the first time, it was illuminated. Everything was.
Hand her the coffee in your hand, idiot. What are you waiting for? Say hi. Don’t. Forget. To. Say. Hi.
So I did just that, and ineptly made my way to the rear of the store.
Well over five octillion atoms comprised her tiny anatomy. That’s twenty-seven zeros. All symphonically coalesced into individual compounds, structures and substances; some of unfathomable complexity. Seamlessly amalgamated into one living, breathing, gorgeous being. To call that amazing would be an understatement. To call her amazing, an injustice.
If I told you that pizza as you know it could very well drop off of the face of the earth within the next decade, how would you react? What about ice cream? Or persimmons, apples, pears and strawberries? If you’re from New York, that first question alone might’ve given you a heart attack. My apologies.
The staple cheese on pizza is mozzarella. Mozzarella is made from milk, which comes from dairy cows, specifically dairy cows that graze on alfalfa, a plant pollinated by three species of bees. Nearly a third of all food consumed by humans in North America is the result of pollination by those very creatures. That constitutes a $12 billion industry in the United States alone. So what’s the problem?
Within the last decade, 60% of the American honeybee population has died. The figures become increasingly alarming as we approach the present. In the winter of 2006, 32% of the population died. The following year, 36 percent. To put these numbers in perspective, picture a million beehives.
Now picture them all dead.
The second derivative of the Greek word katharos, clean. The purging, the cleansing, the expunging of pent-up negativity within oneself. It’s among a select few concepts recognized and regarded with esteem by artists, authors, philosophers and psychiatrists alike.
Aristotle was the first to connote the term with its contemporary associations, the vast spectrum of human emotion. He defined it as the “purging of the spirit of morbid and base ideas or emotions by witnessing the playing out of such emotions or ideas on stage.”
Two millennia later, Joseph Breuer, the mentor and close friend of Sigmund Freud, associated catharsis with one of his patients, Anna. She exhibited dozens of unexplainable symptoms, ones Dr. Breuer could only attribute to hysteria. The refusal to eat and drink, being unable to speak in her native tongue, but being able to speak English perfectly fine, even becoming mute at one point. Anna would get lost within trance-like states, hypnosis without…hypnosis, if you will. During these episodes, she’d be able to form coherent thoughts and convey them to Dr. Breuer without fail. On one occasion she recalled seeing a woman drink from a glass of water immediately after a dog took a sip from it. She was consumed by sentiments of disgust and persevering putridity, but found herself drinking water shortly after. Dr. Breuer attributed her positive change in behavior to the identification of its inhibitory roots and in turn, a profound emotional response. Catharsis in contemporary psychotherapy.
One of my best friends described feelings of anxiety to me earlier and it reminded me of myself a few years back. Having too much on my plate, dealing with contingencies which arose in the personal sphere of my life, and exhibiting bizarre, unexplainable symptoms physically which impeded my daily routine were its stimuli. I sought refuge in books, in music, medical research and eventually running.
The beauty of it lies in its idiosyncratic nature. What may be catharsis for you might be pointless to me, and vice versa. Some find it in running, some in music, others in writing, reading, weight lifting, driving, biking, even working. When you do find what works for you, you’ll know.
Witnessing a few of my close friends and my mother crumble over the past year hit home hard, and I promised myself I’d never allow it to recur within anyone I hold dear. Knowing that I have a significant voice on my blog, I felt it was imperative that I posted this. So for all of you with accrued stress, pain and anguish, don’t take the easy way out and simply give up. Find your catharsis, find your release, and let everything out. You’ll thank yourselves later.
By the second grade, when asked to define a word, students are expected to refrain from reiterating it in their explanations. Most fail initially, but eventually they catch on. After all, how are you to elucidate on its meaning to someone completely oblivious of it, by simply restating the word? That’s like trying to explain the beauty of The Mona Lisa to the congenitally blind.
But we all fall victim to it at some point. Especially when pondering the conceptual. Even the dictionary can’t compete eventually.
Take the word alive, for example. Open any collection of definitions and you’ll find something along the lines of “having life”, “full of life”, “the state of living”, and my personal favorite, “being alive”.
But what does that mean? Is merely being in possession of all necessary vital functions indicative of being alive? Is existing implicative of living? Is human life equatable to that of a sea sponge?
That’s where the lexicon fails.
“Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.”
— E. E. Cummings
Mr. Edward Estin Cummings had it right. God rest his soul.
