Community

A story about the value of community.

Community. A small word with little meaning. 

We let our selves go astray because he had lost values. We let ourselves be compacted and cast forth into the cold world while smiling joyously as it was done. We didn't realize that what we had is what we should have cherished. Now the only thing that exists of it is mere dust of it's presence.

We had lost values in the sense that we didn't value our community. Our friends, our friend's bothers, the people we loved, and those who they affiliated with that we hated. It was all a community, rain or shine. Love or hate. It was who we were in those years. It was not just two boys walking the streets aimlessly trying to find answers in by now forgotten conversations. It was also all those who tagged along with them from time to time and left only to come back later. It was the smiling face of a boy looking down on his two friends through a hole in the ceiling. It was the idea of duty to protect his best friend's brother from lurking perpetrators while he was away at boot camp. It was two friends trading the third from house to house as he was kicked out on the streets. It was three friends dragging out the fourth into going out to eat with them just for the sake of tradition. And it was the burning of ones possessions when one had crossed that tradition; before we had succumbed to the numbness. 

Community. What does it mean anymore? What does it mean in this world where atomization is king, and where we have forsaken our vow to be our brothers keeper. Where is the community we once had that defined us as who we were. Now we journey aimlessly through this world, lying to ourselves that we found those who are better. But we know in our deepest of hearts that it is not true. It will never be true. We know that those who come along glimmering like new will never understand the grime that lays beneath us. The tears, the frustration, the anger, the sleepless nights, the fights. We were all there for the beginning and we can only be there for ourselves in the end. Either we pretend what we are not, or those who come now will only look in puzzlement until they get bored of us and leave. 

Why did we destroy it? Why did we let it wither away and die like a shriveling rose in a cold winters night? Because it's pedals had scratch marks? Because it's stem was bent? If one were to demand of me, "Thou! Give up this puny rose and trade it in for the beautiful bouquet that is in it's magnificence ten-fold." Than I would have to say that I would not give up that collapsing flower for that bouquet. Its scratched pedals are my pride, its limping stem is my history. To give up that which has meaning for that which is pleasurable is only a drug to sooth pain temporarily. Once it is done, that which was sacrificed for its short remedy is gone forever. And yet it was our pain that synthesized into pleasure. We let one's pain branch out to all of us and consume us. And thus, through one's pain we became one with all. 

Those intense years are gone. We are left with huge holes in our hearts as we struggle to find a meaningful existence once more. We should have been there for each other. To guide one another. But yet we let some of us fall by the way side while the others looked down from high horses, galloping along to run away from the very thing they could never escape: themselves.

And yet we still fail to realize that it was the things we hated, that made it what we loved.  

Community. A small word with little meaning.