The River

I've always been more of an essayist, but I'm trying to commit to bigger works. But as it stands, this is my favorite way of writing. It's not my most current work, but its one of my favorites.

We are all desperately trying to swim above the current of what we call life. Gasping for breath we don’t have, will never take. Flailing and turning around, absorbed in futile survival. We don’t notice that we are floating in a river of gold. We don’t notice that we are not alone. It is all taken for granted. We writhe and we cry and we s**t in our river of gold. That is life.
Our time is so short, so desperately short. But ask a drowning man how long he was under, and you understand how very little time means. Our bare moments alive are expanded into eternities. We hit this river kicking and screaming, covered in our mother’s blood. And it is not the current that drives us to panic. It is not the shock that this is a cold river, one that does not think about fair or kind. But we know that it thinks. That is what scares us. We know that we are flailing around in something bigger than ourselves, and completely at the mercy of its twisted will. You long to touch bottom, but your feet rejected as if by a lover that finds them too cold. Our screams are not heard in the dim depths of this river. The greatest of us rise to the very surface only to find it encrusted with a white ice made of bitter cold. Thrashing, wishing to tear the very substance of our prison. Writhing, trying to rid ourselves of our own bodies. Dying, and wasting the time we have to do it.
This river will not claim me before I get to look into the eyes of another. I don’t want to glimpse the suffering of others as we so commonly do. I do not want to posture and pretend to wish their survival as we all so commonly do. I want to look in their eyes and tell them that I will see them in the next river. I want to stare into their soul and snatch the life from them in a way more kind than any other. I want to take their life and know that I have saved someone from drowning. I want to know that I turned struggling in ignorance into accepting with hope. I want to hold that person and feel their warmth. I want to kick with strong legs that will assure me that I have the time to reach that person. That I will not die before I reach another soul.
You already imagine this person. You already wish you could do it yourself. But when was the last time you looked your mother in the eye with something other than boredom and said “I love you.”? When have you turned to a friend, and told them that you will always be a guardian at their back without doubt running through your mind. When have you ever looked into someone’s eyes with a ferocious feeling that rises above all you were taught to ever feel? When have you ever stopped writhing around, and actually torn free of your human chains? Stop drowning. You are only drowning if you fight it, and goddammit there is not enough time for us all to fight it. You are going to die. Everyone is going to die. Get it out of your head that our lives do not end. Stop drowning, and devote yourself. Breathe in a killing dose of life, and go find something to love.
I fight for people. I love people as an organism. I want the best for mankind. I struggle just like we all do. Doubt is just as much my enemy as it is yours. But I do not fear my weakness. There is so much that we are ignorant of. I exist to challenge everything you hold dear, to question every god you can dream of. I am here to make you miserable. I am here to show you that suffering is both the greatest teacher and the greatest distraction. There will be a day when people forget the meaning of pity. One day there will be nothing but swimmers and savers and doers in this river. One day people will realize that they have within themselves greatness beyond all the world. This is my dream and you will never kill it and it will never die.
Water is an amazing thing. Water changes the world in amazing ways. The fastest thing in the known universe, light, is slowed by water. Sound travels seven times further in water than in air. But have you ever tried to talk to someone under water? It’s hard. It’s hard for people to even get the gist of what you are saying. In this golden river of life, there is no real communication through our mouths. Everything we say is as valuable as all the other products of our other various orifices. You do not talk with your mouth. People do not trust. People do not listen. People hear what they want to hear and they fabricate more than they could ever consciously admit to. Communicate with your face. Your eyes will tell everything that will ever need to be said in a lifetime if you let them. A kiss will create more than words ever could describe. Cradling a chin on your shoulder will sooth and heal. Closeness will silence your mouth and allow your heartbeats to get acquainted with one another. I believe in a world where people have forgotten how to say I love you, but learned how to mean it.
But this world we live in does not have those things, and we are losing more every day. Two things strike me most of all. Two recent conquests that have baffled and frightened me. Hope and Change have been bastardized to a point where they are unrecognizable. Hope and Change are powerful ideas that mean more than the breath it takes to say them. I hope that we can save them. I hope that we can change this path we are on. We cannot afford to sell ourselves any further. We swore as people, that those things could never be taken from us; That those things would never be commercialized. Hope and Change are the things that we cannot ever have taken away from us. The people are fed on hope, that they can bring the world to brighter days. The people have always possessed the power to change the world around them. But we are giving it away. In a modern world, where we have so few burdens, we are eager to shed our last remaining few. Freedom is not about having nothing to burden yourself with. Freedom is a burden in and of itself. You have to protect it. You have to give it to the next generation. But the public world has seized Hope and Change with crocodile smiles and glittering eyes. Because the people have failed. Because the ability to Hope and the power to Change are things that we should nestle in our hearts and we have ripped them out.
I am tired of cop-outs. I am tired of passing the buck. I am tired of our fore-fathers. ‘Our fore-fathers fought and died so that you could…’ Could what? Could s**t on everything that they have ever done for you? Could have the luxury of throwing away control of yourself in exchange for peace at mind? Our fore-fathers were businessmen. Jefferson was a military careerist. Franklin was a patent-hungry fiend with fingers in many pies. Washington was a brewer and war profiteer. They fought hard, though. They protected their interests with a desperate and potent fury. They were clever men that did amazing things. But they are not here today. The world is not the same as it once was. I want to tell you about the fore-fathers of today. My fore-father taught 19-year-old kids how to fire their M16s while in a foxhole. My fore-father loses control of his nervous system sporadically due to a bio-agent known as Orange 11. My fore-father has seen things that he will never ever ever speak of. Because words are useless. Because his eyes will tell you the story if you look at them. My grandfather’s eyes are almost always bloodshot.
And I want to tell you something about pain. We fear pain. And the world is a sharp place. The world is a flight of stairs and we are toddlers. Decisions can be painful. So we elect officials to make the decisions for us. We drop the wars and the plagues and the discrimination in their laps hoping never to see it again. Preparing our children for the world can be painful. So we leave the moral, ethical, and academic education of them up to our schools. But that doesn’t fix the pain. Pain is a warning, always was, always will be. A man paralyzed from the waist down will never have to worry about his feet aching, or charley horses, or shin-splints. But is that worth it? Are you willing to sever your spinal cord in exchange for pleasant numbness? Because I know that man would take all the cramps and aches in the world for a chance to run with his son. Don’t cripple yourself. Things hurt because we need fear to keep us in check. We need to be cautious. We need to recognize the importance of educating our children, of facing our world. We need to stand up and walk.
But we are still drowning, and nobody can save you from that. You can drown with your eyes open or shut. You can die alone, cursing that you were given life at all with no breath to utter it. You can writhe and thrash until you forget that you are a person at all, left to rot in blind hatred. You can ride this river of gold any way you want. But I’m going to find someone. And then we are going to find someone. And we are going to drift through life, together, warm, and with love.
 

Author's Note

That first week is almost up, get those extra points while you can!