An incident

Life is funny. A person can wait for his moment of consciousness, of recognition his whole life. The wait for this recognition is a slow one. Remember those lessons you used to hate and which seemed to drag on forever? Well this, of course, is a million times worse, because it is scattered through a whole life span. Living your life for one day, one minute.

That day I was waiting for something to happen. Something. Anything. There are persons who say that happiness does not consist of a single cataclysmic event, but of periodic little things, like seeing cute little puppies and kittens. Feed that to the card company I say. For me, happiness, comes with a big bang, an explosion, a realization of what you have to do. It’s effects may fade with time, but as you look back you can say, you can proudly saw with a smirk on your face, that you know what you came into this earth to do.

I did nothing of this sort. As I said, I was waiting. An incident. The incident which would change my life. That day I thought, was the day I was waiting for. Well I had waited for it my entire life, since I can remember. I didn’t know that it would happen at home though. That day I had a different feeling. I had more hope, not the hope that the patients dying of terminable disease have, but a more tangible hope. So I got up from my girlfriend’s bed, grabbed my notebook and cigarettes and went home.

As I walked through the streets in which I have passed through every day of my life, I knew that I needed change. The route which I passed through was the same but the sidelines had changed over the years. But one thing remained the same. The oak tree in our garden. That oak tree had always been there, and in my mind, would always be there. I decided that I would go and sit under its shade and write and puff away. But when I arrived there, I saw that they were taking it down, without my permission. I ran to my father and asked him why they were doing it. He told me that they were going to take it down, because its roots where so deep that they were eroding the house’s pediment. To me the tree didn’t look threatening but as I took a closer look I saw that he was right, as always. It’s funny how things around you, that is inanimate objects, can parallel your life.

I took that incident as a sign. A need for change. I was too close to home and that if I stayed there my past would erode me, like the oak tree nearly did to the house. And so I fled.