This blue! It is so glassy, so unforgiving. It almost seems that all this heat and brightness are up to something, like desperately catching up with things previously under-performed. Really, it seems lately that some of these things never happened before, it never seemed like today that you badly want all this to go or to end. Too many fires to enjoy the summer, too many storms to enjoy the winter, too much noise to enjoy the day, too much insecurity to enjoy the night, too much of everything to enjoy anything. And, yes, this glassy and unforgiving blue of the sky, that was supposed to mean clearness, is just cruelly reminding me that perhaps somewhere, under it, a blaze is taking away somebody’s dreams and peace.
“-Hi, buddy, you look like you lost something big time. What’s up?”
It’s Dave. He catches you whenever you want to be really alone. It’s seems that I’ve known him for ages even though he’s been my friend for just over one year. We just happened to discover that both of us share similar needs. We just want to be known not only by name but for who we really are.
“-Oh, Dave! Would you, please, tell me what’s that blue of the sky saying to you?”
I knew as I spoke that I just opened a flow of new reasons for “concern” regarding my unorthodox way of looking at life. “You take it as it is!” he likes to say whenever I share some of my new “revelations”.
“-I am afraid, fella, that you exposed that upper end of yours to too much heat. This blue just doesn’t whisper to me. As a matter of fact there is no known history of skies speaking to anybody. Not that you’re hearing things or something, but I guess there’s a whole lot of solid reality that I can spend my time on…”
There is something in that “solid reality”, according to Dave, that clashes with my “unorthodox way of thinking”. In fact there are dozens of orthodox-thinking Daves around me but this particular one is about the only one who bothers sharing his thoughts with me and is patient enough to listen to mine. As I said, my heated mind is quite openly in conflict with the “given reality” that surrounds us.
“- Your idealism”, he would say, “does not feed anyone; not even yourself. As a matter of fact, you can carry your glassy blue picture of the sky within yourself but try not to stain anyone’s soft skies, for your peace’s sake…”
Dave and I spent hours of talk around issues of nobody’s interest. His brisk intellectual processing of reality and my hair-splitting way of interaction with the same reality would be a perfect ground for misfits that would make two people to avoid each other’s presence. Yet it is totally the other way around with the two of us. Most of the times we succeed in avoiding the “touchy subjects” in our conversations even though both of us were burning with desire to bring the other one in our own interest sphere. The greatest difference between Dave and I is that for me it is rather duty than desire. Dave needs to get over his stubbornness and accept his need of salvation. This being said, I don’t mean that he is one of those wicked, untamed, burly individuals… Not at all! Dave is rather a clean cut person, polite and shy, despite his appearance as an outspoken and ruthless humorous guy… His “shock-and-awe” style of jumping in others’ conversation and my “turn-the-table” reaction to that was the starting point of our friendship. This Dave of mine, whether real or fictional, is still a friend I am looking for. As for the rough edges of our differences I am not sure… The above is a scenario of a possibility that I will be open to. “Shock and awe” and “turn the table” attitudes in less hypothetical conversations will probably be a great hinder in that desired by me, meeting of minds… But, as I said sometimes ago, if we were able to come to think together then a friendly handshake will be as normal as… What’s normal anyways?
SLAVOMIR ALMAJAN
Slavomir Almajan's Blog 