Recently I came across this week-spanned holiday. Honouring one’s ancestors.
It’s a little funny, seeing as the trek into “adulthood” is sustaining a distance-aspiration: a studio apartment a few blocks from some convenience store and thousand blocks more from anyone prior. And it’s a little funny, because all the fibres sewn into your disposition, ambitions: all of these found themselves as the crouching tiger along the family lawn. However you built your rock collection so it was under the watchtower of a window-blind lifted. Enduring the endless anxiety of guarding such frail frames now deserted.
So determined to cut off any evidence left. That one belonged to anything at all. Yet while we’re infected with the self-virus so the family pops in-between. Pops into your preferences of things – hot-boiled peanuts for a late afternoon.
Cutting the watermelon in a clever way won’t matter much in the city apartment, so it makes sense to forget about it. Especially since it’s hard to say when you’d find the time to have anyone over, even though that’d seem simple and ample in a prior day: as was the family way. Though fading.
More often than not I see the city as the devourer: the concrete siphons sensibility and whatever vulnerability you’re inadvertently searching with your fifth-rung club escapade. No after-alley has a mother’s embrace. The eyes ice over, the smiles fit their mold: the death of family, however disputed. Nevertheless it’s absolute.
If you want a barometer for someone’s sanity, looking at family relations is pretty telling. In this respect, most of America is deathly ill but asserting it otherwise: asserting a staunch independence dodging the family-ran businesses keeping one together; becoming another child, mother as government and father as marketplace. Even though no parent would want you to sell yourself, no sane one at least.
Maybe you try to form a new family in the friends you collect, but how’d that ever work when it’s a rag-tag group of independers? Oh, it works for a bit, until it’s a bit too much. Such heavy feelings are reserved for those who had a fate tied to you through blood, though we cut the strands so readily, probably a bit bitterly: probably a bit matter-of-factly; why stick around?
Because when you no longer have that chance, you’ll know then.
When you’re the only one left, you’ll know then.