Chapter Eight

It happened really quickly, like those few seconds before a car accident when you know that it's going to happen, and it was like that thought you have when you notice a small indentation and you tell yourself not to trip on it on your way out, but you always do - just as your remembering.  Or it was at least similar to these.  I was sitting; like usual at this time, on the arm of a tree hanging over the river that flowed through the center of town.  Sometimes I sat there watching the geese chasing the children as they were learning not to throw rocks at them.  Sometimes I sat there just watching the water reflecting the trees along the opposite bank, and sometimes I just read.   I was staring out into the reflection of the water as the first of the clouds began to pass in the sky overhead that would bring the first of the rain drops that wouldn't phase me much.  Even with the downpour that followed I still sat there in the tree watching the sky in the reflection of the river that flowed through the center of town.  It wasn't until the rains brought the cold winds that I left, though I wasn't really leaving I was only going back to another place that I was familiar with and the whole drive back I saw this town in a way that I have never seen it -  revealing itself as if I had been away for years and years and I was driving here on the streets trying to remember which roads would lead me to the different places that I used to spend hours upon hours unwinding.  I no longer recognized it.   I stared out my window; at home, at a deer tiptoeing through the trees and seeing him as if he was sitting hunched over a bar looking through his bottle at some other side that he couldn't quite reach.  He tiptoed thinking he might sneak past whatever it was that was drawing him to that same bar stool each night,  but wasn't nearly as accessible to him as the dark bottle in his hands that only reminded him just how far he really was from where he needed to be.  Our black lab chased the deer out of sight then strutted back triumphantly.  We had a set of wind chimes hanging on the front porch that would chime in every time I thought too deeply about something and these chimes wouldn't fail to to live up to their dharma, they scared our black lab as he passed them returning from an interlude of slumber and he looked around embarrassed for anything or anyone that may have seen.  Not too dissimilar from a dogs best friend.  A car heading down the dead end road and passing the first house on the right honked and waved at the idea of someone being home,  I didn't wave back, but only because they didn't wait for a response.   My family had lived on this chunk of land since the seventies, back when my dad and his brothers roamed the mindscape, climd trees and built forts.  Just south of the house was this small forest that came to be known as "Sherwood".  They, my dad and his brothers, cut out tunnels and wooden caverns through the brush and I guess they just sat there.  Using their imaginations and instinctively playing out their fantasies. A feeling too many of us tend to ignore as we get older, unless of course, you dress up in the expected apparel and play out the mixed reviewed series of events dictated solely by the Dungeon Master.  Anyway, though, I wandered the tunnels grown in by vines and bush and sat on a wood stump that was strategically placed for purposes I'll never fully understanding; unless, that is, I just ask.  While I was sitting there the deer tiptoed by with his nose brushing the ground; he stopped, once, and looked up towards the house completely still.  His black eyes blank and seemingly empty.  After a minuet he began brushing his nose in the grass again, then again looking up towards the house.  This time though flashing his tail straight up attempting to disarm his invisible foe and running off the other direction.  The whole time he was no more then five feet away from me and I could smell the alcohol on his breath.  I lay in bed awake that night thinking about the last few years.  I graduated high school and immediately enrolled in a nearby University; convincing myself that I didn't need to actually go to class to learn the material.  It wasn't until I stopped going to all my classes that I realized I miscalculated my ambition.   I felt lost-staring up into the ceiling-going back to a time where young people were entitled, at a certain age, to venture off into an unknown; alone and uncertain for as long as they needed to in order to return enlightened.  You cannot truly ever know yourself until your willing.  Now a days, at the same age, we're expected to confront High School and College.  We, as a people and society have grown smarter but less intelligent.  Ideas have been expressed and expanded, polished and built upon but they could never compete with feeling, with a collaborated understanding of creation.  I guess I forced it upon myself - venturing out into the unknown, alone.  I wasn't ready to adhere to this passably new expectation of ourselves.  Set aside all those late nights,  those cliches and addictions; empty expectations and broken promises; american dreams and corporate improvisations and we're left with an idea  of reality.  A form of nothingness that surrounds and escorts us towards perfection, the catalyst of creation.  Where its neither black or white but visually unrivaled and mentally identical to this nor that.  Those few seconds before the car accident or the inevitable fall cursed by your overdue recollection is where compos mentis is hiding.  At which point you've neither returned or left your simply, here.  Where reality is waiting for you to embark; willingly, to accept everything and welcome to knowing nothing