“Too Far Gone” by The All-American Rejects… “Please speak slowly, my heart is learning. Teach me heartache, stop this burning…”

Some memories are difficult to remember. It is in their nature to be elusive and burrow themselves deeply in the recesses of your mind. They’re hidden because they are fading.

I can’t remember anything before I met her. You know, it really does feel that way when you fall in love. You’re left a little confused, wondering what life you had before you met that person. It feels like you started life anew, like you’re now walking over the memories of the times when you used to crawl through life. The sky travels through your pupils bluer than ever and your mind seems clearer. Both are cloudless. The chorus of birds in the morning give their resounding approval of another day in your life and the grass smells as sweetly as it would to ruminants. The light no longer hurts your eyes and you notice the colours of the rainbow in everything around you.

Within the last few times that I’ve spoken to my friends they have told me their own variations of, “You seem really happy. Well, you must be after all.” Whilst I don’t agree with living positively through negative reaction, for example, be happy because there is nothing to be unhappy about, it’s never always been easy to find something positive to invest my happiness in. Life is like a bank you can deposit units of happiness in. The more you invest, the more you could potentially be gaining interest on, and that’s how I see it.

Yes, you can be afraid and do all the risk-assessment you want, but with some things, being too prudent will have you missing out on more exciting ventures. And you must be able to reflect. There’s a well known question attached to the great philosopher, poet and critic George Santayana that goes, “Are those who do not remember history, condemned to repeat it?” You must be able to reflect on the times that have passed and use them to push yourself onwards. No matter what has happened and no matter how matte the lining on the clouds above you may have become, your life always goes on. Introspection and contemplation are both powerful tools. They are your knife and fork as you feast on the best that life has to offer. If you can look deeply inside of yourself and convince yourself that you have lived a great life with great love, then you’ll have become a better person as a result of it.

A quote you undoubtedly would have heard by now is Saint Augustine’s, “Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.” This quote invariably manifests itself in your mind following the end of a relationship you once held dear in your heart. It is supposed to help you to reflect and remember that all is not lost during those abstruse times. I know what it feels like to have my heart broken. I know what it feels like to hurt. I remember at those times I would make a desperate attempt to hold onto shreds of that time, only they were not shreds. They were shards. And shards being shards, they cut into me, making me bleed wherever I remained in contact with what I was trying to hold onto. Even with the crimson growing in abundance, it made sense to hold on. It continues to make sense in this way until you’ve had time to sit away from it and reflect on it. It is then that you realise you wasted so much of your time with the machines of self-pity. You wasted your time wallowing in the depths of something you had no control over. I’ve always believed in one thing through bad times and it is this: Sometimes things will turn out the way they do, regardless of whether you make it hard on yourself or not. If I ever had to impart one piece of personal wisdom, then it is this line. Please remember it.

I tell you, you are better off to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. You have to take the good with the bad and never be suspicious of the times when the good seemed to be present. With matters of the heart, that which does not kill you only makes you stronger. At the time when I was sat on the floor, with two pieces of my heart cupped in my hands, I never thought of these things that I am now so clearly able to tell you today. The pain can make you blind to everything that is good; everything that is good inside of you. You can’t let that die, because you will feel beautiful again. Those scars will disappear. You have become a better person because you have loved, even if it had been for a short time.

Altruism. This is a word that I came across consciously for the first time whilst reading “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins in a chapter where he was describing the unselfish act of parents giving up their lives to further that of the child. This act comes from evolutionary zoology where it is observed that we instinctively do things sometimes that are detrimental to our own life, but will benefit someone else. Altruism means to be selfless; to wish someone well on their continuation of a journey even though it is difficult for you to see them go, even if it is you who is the one that is going.

On a level, life is something that needs to be risked to be truly appreciated. It’s maybe the same reason you get that rewarding feeling inside of you when you’re riding a roller coaster or when you’re there with your eyes closed, experiencing your first real kiss. The rush you get, that’s the adrenaline. It’s your fight or flight mechanism firing off, preparing you for withdrawal or warfare. When your heart arrives at the gates of something new, you should always choose to stay and fight the battle if need be. Struggling with your emotions and wrestling with the part of you that wants to trust and believe in the other person is always a battle. At what point can you completely trust the people you love anyway? The truth is, you can never be totally sure, but you place your trust in them anyway. You do this because the rewards outweigh the risks by far and for that moment you can’t think of doing anything but share yourself with that person. Some things you share and some things you give away. Sharing is good for the both of you, but you have to give parts of yourself away to truly come away with something more.

I find myself having to borrow quotes to aid in wading my point across. After all, you’ve probably already heard them in your own way. There are many ways to interpret all these words, but the secret to appreciation is simple and was encapsulated perfectly in words by the great user of English, G.K. Chesterton. It’s one of my favourite quotes of all time and it goes like this: “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” When in the arms of your loved one, take it as something that can be taken away from you at any time, because by the ephemeral nature of the world, it can. Even if you have never been living this way, it wouldn’t hurt to strive to change your life and live it around this quote, because this can be applied to everything in life. This is because everything can expire.

I know memories expire when you continue time and time again to oversee them. How many of you can hold a photograph of your own in your hand and recall that very moment the shutter fired? Can you step into the photograph and walk around, feeling everything in three dimensions with all your senses? For me, photographs are not things that allow me to become lazy with my memories. They are personal treasures captured from hanging moments that are often spontaneous. They enhance the way I am able to remember things by taking account of my other senses besides sight. They are things that help me to remember the other things I cannot sense with my eyes. Taking a picture does not make me become reliant on it to remember that which was ensnared, because a picture is just that; a picture. It’s something you can only see with your eyes and it’s only when you attach yourself to it that it can paint a thousand words.

“Fleeting moments that become like an eternity.” It’s simple, but it’s one of the most memorable lines in any book I’ve read. The quote comes from Peter Hoeg’s “Borderliners.” Its meaning is also simple: Time is something one has to hold onto.

Where does time go when you stop writing your thoughts down? Where does time go when you let it run over you like the individual streams from a waterfall? For the past few weeks I sat basking in its existence, enjoying it, forgetting each passing second as it emulated another droplet. Since the last time, summer had arrived and the sky made no small deal out of this. It appears happy again; blue again, in a colour that would make the Aegean turn an envious green. And like the Aegean, it appears timeless. I am sitting at my desk and I am rereading Antoine de Saint-Exubery’s “The Little Prince.” I ended up reading the whole book again out of want of rereading one particular chapter, for one particular passage. As soon as I happened upon Chapter 21, I was reminded why I wanted to revisit it in the first place.

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”

We were but two people amongst a multitude of others, unique only to the people that knew us. There are things she said that made me rethink this part of one of my favourite stories. Her words reminded me of her stance in this world, which we now share. They reminded me that there is a beauty inside of her that was blind to the world; a beauty that was once untamed. She would tell me otherwise, but I try not to disagree with her too much. I know very well that if a person were ever perfect, they would be completely oblivious of their own perfection. And in my eyes she was completely oblivious of herself.

She had always told me in her own words that we were just two ordinary people trying to make sense of the things around us; we were just two ordinary people like the many out there who tried to understand the way things are and came to be. We were inquisitive creatures that freely foraged for our nuts and berries like squirrels in an emerald forest. The world was our grand forest and the answers it contained were our nuts and berries; they were our very means of sustenance. It is just unfortunate that answers are not as easy to catch as falling acorns. They are very much unlike the dew one could collect by brushing one’s hands through blades of grass on a cold spring’s morning. Answers also have no natural receptacle with which to be contained outside of our minds, so it is inside there that we search, and by law of their abstraction they cannot be collected in a net like the butterflies that roam and flutter in their best imitation of human hearts over orchards in the summer.

Maybe she’s right. We really are just two people, but what separates us from everyone else is that we are unique to each other. We are unique in this way because the heart refuses to be tamed so easily. It doesn’t obey like the cracks from a whip are intelligible to a lion. It takes time to ease comfortably into the social strata of someone else’s space and remains untamed till it is handled with the right care by the right person; someone who truly understands the world the same way because that’s the way they’ve been seeing it their whole life too.

Time is indeed a relative thing. And look how much time has passed since you last noticed it trickling past you. In the meantime that has just passed I have learned many things. I am another step closer to understanding the great enigma we have all come to question, and oh, how I learned of my tendency to question things! Is it not in our very nature to have a mind clouded with doubt and answers that seem so elusive that they have the power to drive a curious heart onwards along a most potentially perilous and turbulent journey?

We look around ourselves for answers. We pause. We hesitate. We turn our questions around in our hands and allow them to dance and take form like potter’s clay. But more often than not, they seep through the gaps we create between our fingers as we try to shape them into something we can understand. We all set about trying to find answers in different things, depending on what makes sense to us. I have always looked for answers to my own questions in stories; words stringently arranged and strung linearly in a manner that I can step into. I have always believed that one person’s story is another person’s inspiration. No matter how difficult a story is to listen to or how easy it is to conjure up in the mind, a story is a previously traversed ravine. It is a path from a single point to another that once never existed. Stories may be fictional or factual, but in your mind they are very much as alive as the temperamental dragon that lives at the bottom of your garden.

How limited time is when one forgets about it. I have said in the past that time is relative. At that time, I only understood its meaning up to a certain extent. As I read my old words back, they took on a new meaning; a new life. Sometimes time really does flow like water tracing paths down a steep mountain. Sometimes it trickles by so slowly like thick syrup clinging to the sides of a decanted container and it’s at those latter times that I feel things could be better. If you can look back into the past and wonder how so much time has passed, you can be sure you’ve led a happy past.

Time is the crux of life. Its passage permits life to be perpetually mutable; to forever be facilitating change. I am aware that much has changed since the last time I noticed and that things continue on their course, constantly changing, whether I acknowledge it or not. But I continue to embrace it all with the same hope that anyone unsure of their own future does. All one can do is accept that time will never wait for us and that change will never wait for us. They just happen, so one just has to accept them. The one thing that doesn’t just happen is appreciation. We have always been granted the freedom to exercise our minds and our hearts and with them the uncapped potential to appreciate. It takes time to realise this.

And then when you do, it’s an abrupt realisation and it changes you quicker than you could notice autumnal leaves taking on their new colour. You wake up in the middle of the night to the call of nature, but not the kind you may have been used to. It’s a different type of nature that once felt unnatural but now feels as natural as the cool breeze that gingerly caresses your exposed skin on a winter’s morning. It ratifies all the thoughts you had carefully packaged over the years and it comes in the form of an inner voice that tells you you’ve never ever felt like this before, about anyone. The upturned sides of my mouth are without a shadow of a doubt called smiles, for now they come to exist because of specific things; a person, a face and the things I feel when I take a moment to conjure her up through my closed eyes.

I remember the very first time we held each other, cloaked by the presence of darkness in the room. It was dark enough for me to only be able to see outlines. I looked at the silhouette before me and with my eyes, traced lines, illustrating the soft features of her face. Under the disguise of night, I had to draw on my memory to paint an accurate picture. With each progressing moment my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, and in their adjustment her visage slowly took on more detail as though it really were I who had painted her into existence. And then when I finally see her I am reminded of all the other things in her that I cannot see with my eyes.

“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

She makes me smile. She makes me laugh. And my heart can’t help but follow.

I awoke on Saturday from my early afternoon nap to the sound of frantic scurrying around upstairs. The sunlight pierced through the half drawn curtains in my room, indicating that the good weather was on this side of the world again. The days were getting longer and the sun made a point of hanging around outside the house. A welcome change. I shifted my weight from the left side of my body to the other and tried to regress back to a slumber, discounting the sounds that had released me from my repose.

Then I heard it again. The same scuttling, but this time being carried down the staircase, accompanied with what sounded like the pugnacious clamouring of one of my housemates, BWG. The sounds became louder. I definitely heard two pairs of feet moving swiftly through the kitchen and that was when everything came within audible distance. BWG was yelling, that was for sure. I wiped a good quantity of the Sandman’s dust from my eyes and brushed my ears as if to optimally warm them like they were transistors being prepped for the reception of an important signal emanating from the kitchen area. “Get out! Get out!” The tone in BWG’s voice indicated a sense of immediacy, which in my drowsy state, sounded very much like his speech was peppered with hostility. I heard my other housemate, Sav, reply with a muffle or two, which was met by BWG’s bellowing of “Get out! Get out now! I don’t care what you do. Go lie down in the middle of the road!”

At first my mind decided to wander towards the possibility that the house was on fire and that we had to evacuate, taking our most sentimental/expensive possessions with us. Luckily my room is on the ground floor, so without posing any real danger to myself, I could make a few trips to remove most of my belongings from the inferno. In that momentary juncture, I had already set in my mind the pieces I’d save from the fire first. I’m of the mind that everything material is replaceable, but it makes sense to give priority to the objects our memories are most attached to no matter how trivial they are to the rest of the world.

Even in my sleep-induced stupor a conflagrant roof was only a split-second possibility because my housemates’ cries would have been drowned out by the shrill offerings of the fire alarms in the house, one of which resides just outside my bedroom door. From experience, leaving the kitchen door ajar with sausages sizzling in a pan had been enough to set our smoke detectors wailing, so it dawned on me almost immediately that the chances of a fire going down at that moment was extremely unlikely. Besides, in the event of a fire, why would BWG ask Sav to go lie down in the middle of the road? Oh, well I guess Sav could have been the thing that had been set alight (Note: When on fire, the first thing to do is fight the temptation to continue running and screaming all the slurs in your personal lexicon. The best protocol is actually to simply stop, drop to the ground and roll over the inflamed portions on your person. This is the most efficient means of extinguishing the flames, second to being incarcerated in water, sand or foam. Oh, and you obviously wouldn’t do that if you were standing in a shallow lake of petrol).

So, no chances of fire. The only plausible scenario then was that the brown had finally hit the fan and my two housemates had finally stepped over each other’s lines of dwindling tolerance for each other. In the heat of a disagreement, I often liken the two to a married couple. There are no real hard feelings by the conclusion and despite their differences, they can get along for the sake of the children, or something. I guess it’s just interesting for me to look in from the outside and see them battle over which of them gets to wear the pants that day. With the proverbial faeces splattered against the rotating blades, I had visions of BWG wielding a rolling pin, lambasting a bloodied Sav in mid-flight down the stairs before chasing him into the street, painting in claret a picture of Sav’s demise in full view of the shocked neighbours. It would be one of those clichéd moments like in the movies where mothers would stare open-jawed, covering their mouths with one hand and their child’s innocent eyes with the other.

Nothing was really making sense and as I began the long arduous process of tightening my abdominals and sitting up in bed, Sav knocked on my door, simultaneously bursting in. Upon meeting my eyes, I saw he was not reduced to a bloodied pulp nor was he nursing any modifications to his skull. He was gushing red from no orifice nor clutching any potentially escaping organs. He was instead, grinning as though he had been under the tutelage of one particular Cheshire Cat. I was expecting BWG to stagger into my room at that point with a knife handle protruding from his chest, but that didn’t happen either. What happened was Sav joyously proclaiming “The ice cream van is here! The ice cream van is here!” and asking me if I wanted anything. I declined and shortly after that, a pristine BWG enters my room and asks me in his own unique way if I wanted anything from the ice cream van. After expelling the remnants of morning stars from my eyes, I decided on a cone with a chocolate Flake. With our fresh dairy purchases we chatted for a while in the warmth of our non-blood soaked kitchen and after that I went back to bed. For the time that I was under the covers, I managed to find all the sleep I lost during the previous week. It was a good discovery.