Emotional Truths: The Myth of Icarus
He stepped low off the docks, stumbling into emotional truths. Staring at the shallow tide coming in on some sandy beach and leaving the building blocks of life sticking on pressure-treated beams
Chemical concoctions from years of evolution devoted to digestion bring with them the taste of salt water and the smell of decay. Every day, one at a time for what seems like forever to us, but is only the motion of one epoch to the next and the game plays out as an exchange of forms for another in a cycle of methodical destruction and haphazard reassembly. These blank stares that these little sponges produce cannot be calculated or quantified as the person themselves is not privy to their meaning nor would they want to be. So time and life in all its complexity and cold heartedness creeps onward, without consideration for our record keeping or our awareness.
The old stories from his older sister echo in the lapping of the water, where he can hear his family’s questions close like airlocks into statements of warnings. “Why do you keep looking out at the sea, you’ll get lost out there.” As he clings to his drawing pad like a life vest, the sound of helicopters demand he focus not just on the patterns of the waves but demand he forgo giving into the fuzz over eyes and get the bones in his body moving.
“Watch the bones in your hands tense up, and your teeth grind on each other all angry like. As you get fed up with their schemes and ads for false dreams, move like you mean it. There you go describing the ground that sinks and compresses beneath your feet. As the stones refuse to line up on your path. And you feel the weight of your own hand and you find yourself at a place where there are no checks and balances.” “Move like you mean it…and get fed up…”
He’s chopped up by the sound that splits his ears and the weight of his body splinters his ankles, as he tries to make out a distant island where her memory lives.
Submarines were made for warfare, so was the radio. He believes paper was too, to deliver doctrines and enlist soldiers. He mulls over his bright eyed dreams of being a prophet and a propagandist. Those dreams take on different forms as he sees his place in all that is happening now. Could he have ever been beyond the action movies and entitled heroes of his domineering and gold panning past? It is near night when he finally finds peace as the choppers leave.
The water surrounding the island is deeper and he must step carefully as the sand may give way to his weight. “You can see the cracks starting to form.”
