David Bronson

It is easy to get lost.

Each life contains within it a countless number of long-lost stories. Time, memory, and circumstance all operate such that most of the things that happen to us pass unnoticed, undocumented, untold.

The adaptive sense that forces us to push on and move through events, people, places, and times, sees to it that things keep moving, that we keep moving, and there are innumerable benefits to this.

But another result is that things fall through the cracks along the way and get lost. Things happen around us and to us and the result is something like a piece of molded clay; impressions are made upon us, and into us, but we keep moving on. There is accumulation, some good, some bad. There is growth and there is damage.

It can also become very easy for a person to get lost inside of him or herself, sometimes for years at a time, in the name of creating something true, but possibly losing sight of the original point of the entire endeavor, which is always simply to express; to express something that felt too significant to simply let fall through the cracks and get lost.

So, like many other works, this story contains within it another story; the story of its own making, which is just another analog for growth, and which, in its own way, is every bit as real, as complex, as painful, difficult, hopeful, and joyous as the original story.

A young man sits at a desk in a small, nondescript, windowless office in downtown Boston. He has just arrived, a new temp worker, just a few months out of college. Two superiors hover around, both female, both blonde. The younger of the two, just a few years older than the boy, is mildly attractive, and a decent conversationalist. The older one, fair-skinned, slender, and more than amply endowed, looks and acts like the stereotype of a 1950’s airline stewardess.

Within a few weeks both females take an unmistakable liking to the young newcomer. Nothing overtly sexual; one is married, the other engaged, and both seem to possess an uncommonly high degree of moral fiber relative to the modern-day society in which they live. But our boy nevertheless starts to feel the faint tingling of a particular, familiar sensation, at once thrilling and endlessly comfortable. It arises from before memory, like something written in the code of his DNA. It is the one feeling that, if he’s being honest, trumps all others; adoring female attention.

But it is stopped dead before it can be felt by all but the deepest and most resilient layers of his consciousness. In its place arise pain, anger and fear. It is a feeling that he no longer trusts.

Before long, the young man listens to headphones for the better part of each workday, as he mindlessly performs his duties.

A few months go by. Some days he actually falls to pieces inside. Not at a memory of her, or at the sudden immediate pang of irreplaceable-ness and finality. But slowly, listening each day to the throbbing, repeating, vibrato’d guitar hymn of the Rolling Stones’ Let It Loose, he begins to feel a distant ember of hope returning; the faintest stirrings of reassurance that it will all, eventually, turn out ok.

To perform solitary work
For well more than a decade
To be alone
To be pumped so full of the energy of the universe
That you feel as though you will burst from the fullness
When it is happening

To feel death most every day
And some much more than others
To yearn for connection
To yearn for love
Lost and yet to come
And then finally
To have it

To smell and see and touch
And live among baseness everywhere
To be disgusted by your fellow man
By your culture, your society
Their values
Their waste
Their constantly demonstrated stupidity
And then to love, to cherish, be astounded by, in awe of
And so deeply thankful for
Your nation
Its premises
Its history
Its elasticity
Its variety
Its output
And its opportunity
Which is your opportunity
While realizing at the same time how broken it is
Just like us

And then to identify with anyone who does what you do
And feels what you feel
In any place and any time
Much more than those who do not do and feel these things and ways

To feel always
And to be numb
To be broken
And broke
To live like a king
To treat yourself, and others
And search endlessly
Hoping to grow
Well

When I can look at something,
take it in just for the sake of itself
I am happy
Too often the implants of our culture jump to ask
“how can I use this?”
and I become immediately not-happy
I do my best to suppress this learned urge every day
because I know
at the level of deepest existence
it isn’t there

writing about one’s past is a little questionable,
in a cop-out sort of way,
a kind of avoidance of the living
but no more so than writing about the present
or the future
or anything for that matter
so is it any worse to write about
writing about the past?
I guess not