Thus Wrote Abraham

Why does our brain latch onto good memories at the most inopportune times? I’m talking full-on masochistic, self-inflicted suffering through rapid fire vignettes of bifurcated stories, their infectious second half consisting of intoxicating sweetness and a hint of “look at what you’ve lost you miserable fuck.” The first half partially factual, mostly just reminders of how suboptimal your conditions were, and how good you could have had it if you didn’t whine so much or maybe if you had performed some kind of miracle like parting the Red Sea you could’ve fixed all the things that are so fucking wrong with this world.

How can we be wired up for survival if our mind has a will of its own and an affinity to induce despair? I’m talking about the kind to make oneself succumb to sleepless nights, exacerbate suicidal ideation, embrace illness, or some tribal indoctrination by means of a tennis, literature, AA or church group that strips you of your very own abilities to understand yourself as an individual.

Our other most venerated but susceptible organ, the heart, is so puerile and acts so foolish but in a funny way, even a cute way that sometimes convincing artists write stories and poems and movie scripts its not even funny how they profit so much off our sorrows and squalid merry-go-round of life. Then we go on to read or see their works in full polychromic splendor all the while we laugh it off or pretend to concede to our imperfections and our incorrigible faults. Our minds are so obtuse that way too, that they would much rather jump to conclusions or flee towards nothing shy of the callous imagination, leaving you stranded like “I don’t know what I am supposed to feel right now. I don’t know what I should do and this is too fucking much for anyone (my poor, sorry self) to handle.”

We survive by adapting but why do we have to adapt through such immensely painful changes and why do we have to be so fickle and stupid in our capacity to rationalize at the most pivotal moments in which all our abilities are called into action and we just stand there, catatonic, heart racing, pounding incessantly at the thought of making a choice even remotely consequential in an unfavorable way? It’s then that you realize that “survival” is but a mere orchestration by frightened people. Those who receive the pain without complaint and those that produce it are one and the same really, because they’re united by fear.

And yet we lived to see another day, somehow in all that obfuscating heap of shit thrown at our faces we still managed to wipe it clean off our periphery and we tried to embrace the smiles, the genuine phonetic exchanges, and the caress of a warm hand against our brooding expressions. From all this coldness and isolation of the heart against our surroundings we found not only comfortable solace but also detestable ignorance, for as safe as we feel we really begin to accumulate regret and other contrition at the fact that we simply deprive ourselves from the unalloyed, natural happenstances of life. It’s as if you take yourself away from the frame, you withdraw from the match, you become more pathetic than pathetic on the ground and bleeding but at least still breathing.

Then one day the memories come back, making their way one by one like a carousel photographic display instrument. Each one ascribes to why you’re still here, what so infinitesimal but significant things happened in your frivolous and mundane life you whined so much about that invigorated you even the slightest to see another day. Lamentably, its as much a punishment for your conscience and to humanity’s circuitous bullshit I-don’t-wanna-talk-about-it as it is a palliative for your aching heart. You sit and think and you do so for a while, the memories claiming a segment of their own in your mind and holding fort without a chance for surrender. They become more intense, but in the aftermath of it all, you can only hope that one day you can give off that look that old people give when you ask them to share their wisdom at a time of tribulation for a much younger and inept person.

The rain suddenly makes you pensive, the wind speaks to you candidly, and the beaming sun gaze seems to embellish your melancholy with exuberance you hadn’t pinpointed before. Maybe it’s not so bad after all, maybe its that evolution happens every time all over again for the next person to walk the earth.