Christian

“My name is Christian and I’m five years old,” he said to the suited man, Kirk Cherry. A boy talking to a businessman at a late morning street corner, people may have thought them related. Holding a box of jellies in one hand, the boy held his other outstretched, reaching almost to the end of the tie below the man’s jacket’s done-up buttons. The morning meeting had started a few minutes ago. The longer Kirk took, the longer he was going to keep his employees waiting. His alarm clock should have worked, but just when it was needed, it decided to run out of batteries. Time’s an unreliable bitch; sometimes. He moved to cross the street.

“Excuse me, sir, could you please help me cross the street?” voiced the boy. “Mummy says I can’t cross without an adult because it’s not safe.” Kirk turned his head slightly. Yes, he was talking to him – hand out, unkempt hair, oversized clothes, barefoot. Kirk’s pocket vibrated. He was late. The boy smiled and like clockwork, the guilt set in. He couldn’t just leave him there. He was late anyway, so what’s another minute? “Please, sir.” He moved his briefcase to his left hand and took the boy’s. The small fingers were traced with the sweat of youth. He stepped his foot once more onto the concrete, but the boy hesitated.

“Sir, it’s not green yet, we shouldn’t go.” The grip weakened, and Kirk knew he was going to have to wait. There were no cars coming, but the traffic lights were never in sync with traffic itself. He’d have to wait. Damn. Unless…

Squatting, he met the boy’s born-yesterday eyes. “You know,” he began, “it’s safe to cross when there’s no cars coming, or when the light’s green. It’s a small town, and there’s not much traffic in the morning. All you have to do is check both ways and then go when it’s clear.”

The boy’s eyes probed Kirk’s forehead – maybe he found a pimple, or a wrinkle. But he didn’t say anything. At the change to green, they crossed. His meeting beckoned.

Batteries – forgotten. The relentless pager in his pocket prompted Kirk to hurry again the next day. At the same intersection, there was the boy again, waiting to cross, once again, hesitant to cross. Apparently, life hadn’t taught him yet that it was okay to bend the ‘rules’ – that’s to say, he still listened to his mother. As Kirk approached, the boy turned and bounded with his hand outstretched.

“Hi, sir! My name’s Christian and I’m five years old.”

“So that’s your name, is it? Do you want me to help you cross the street, Christian?” An eager nod. “Do you remember what I told you yesterday? How it was safe to cross if it’s green or if there’s no cars coming?” He shook his head. Typical kid. To him, life is just a moment, and everything else is forgotten. “Well, it’s safe now to cross.”

“Mummy said to go only when it’s green. Can you please help me cross when it’s green?” Refusal would not get him to the office in time, and his pocket urged him to agree.

The next morning, there was no such rush. The alarm clock woke him up on time. At the same intersection, Christian waited on the other side of the street. He stood there on the concrete by the traffic lights, transfixed by the colour of rejection that denied passage to the cars ahead. Opportunity seized, Kirk crossed.

“Excuse me, sir! Can you please help me find something? I dropped my box of jellies. Can you find my box of jellies?” It lay fallen, rejected, nearby.

“Here you go, boy. It was just over there.” And Christian appreciated it and held out his other hand, this time to shake. How can a five-year-old forget where he put his jellies? Supposedly, he may have just dropped them without a care in his sweet momentary world. “How come you’re on this side of the street? Yesterday when I found you, you were over there.”

“Mummy said I could cross if it was green and if an adult took me.”

“Ok, so someone helped you?”

“Yes, a man. He didn’t say anything but I just took his hand and he walked me across.”

Now, obviously his mother hadn’t taught him about strangers. “You probably shouldn’t have done that. What if the man was dangerous or had a gun?”

“I don’t think he had a gun. He took me across the street. I thanked him and then I wanted to go see my mummy.”

“Maybe you should tell her to stop sending you for sweets without an adult, people can be more dangerous than cars.”

“But mummy said to do what she says, and she said it was okay if I asked the adult and the adult took me across when it was green.”

Kirk’s face tensed. Where had parental responsibility gone? It wouldn’t help anyone to go through life without learning which risks are worth taking and which ones aren’t. The mother needed lessons, too. The kid’s obedience may end up costing them more than his jellies.

“Listen,” and their eyes levelled, “Can you take me to your mummy, Christian? I’d like to talk to her.”

Hand in hand, the boy led Kirk through disregarded alleyways and buildings where there once must have been activity. His pocket started vibrating sometime but he turned the bloody thing off, preferring the solitude to the interrupting reminders of his daily routine. He’d be just a few minutes late… not enough to cause a dispute – after all, the manager was an integral part of the business and they wouldn’t function without his involvement. They might even take it as a sign of Kirk’s confidence in them that he’s letting them start the meetings without his presence. His job had always been to ensure the numbers added up properly – so there couldn’t be any discrepancies on his watch. Profits had to match earnings at the end of the day. That would come. Time didn’t matter for the moment. He was going to do a good deed.

Christian let go of his hand to place the box of jellies onto a pile of about twenty, all stacked on top of a small stone at the head of a dirt mound. A wan “Maree” was scribbled on the stone. “Hi mummy, here’s your jellies!” He sat on another stone directly adjacent to the pile, a stone part of a whole row of differently sized and shaped stones in a courtyard’s worth of grass and dirt and worms.

“I dropped my box of jellies on the footpath, but this man found it for me, and he wants to talk to you.” This is where their gazes met once more, but Kirk hesitated. What was there to say?

Just as the moment arrived, it had already left. There was no one around, no one else to talk to, no one to explain to him what had happened. But, he understood, then. The silence somehow justified Kirk’s cold demeanour. What was he supposed to say, and to whom? Christian was five. He was only five. Kirk took a few steps back, thinking some distance would help him gain some perspective. There were names on the nearby stones, too. But he couldn’t sob in front of someone who wouldn’t understand why he would be sobbing. Someone who kept their innocence alive by their ignorance to the truth would have to come into their own realisation in their own time. Kirk managed to smile, but Christian didn’t change his expression. His eager eyes looked right through him. Time would slowly trickle cruelty in his jellies until his pile crumbled, when he might build it back up.

“Mummy says thank you for being concerned for me,” said the boy. “She appreciates your care. She says she knows the man that took me across the street because she sent him to take me across the street. That’s all I need to know to be safe. Thank you for coming to see, mummy sir!” and again he held out his hand, for someone to hold.

Shedding Skin

Gotta wonder when it's time to feel right, when it's time to live the right life that you wanted. Don't you? Sometimes, I listen to songs and I reminisce, to myself, about the feelings that they have brought me. Somehow, those songs that once struck me with a sentiment of sadness, loss, loneliness, feel comfortable now when I listen to them. Maybe it's time to shed my skin, my exterior, for the form that's an expression of love.

Can you see how I sound? Ridiculous. Talking about love as if I even know what it is. I'm still a boy, dreaming of what love could be. Yet I know I am love. Seen from the eyes of the lost, it sounds vague, unfamiliar. Seen from the eyes within, it's true. But toggling between two visions is tiring, as I am in the transition period. I know which one I'm picking but focus isn't yet straightforward enough.

I need to know me, to remember me. I have forgotten, I have lost, which means I can regain. I can discover, I can come once more. I call love, I drink the beauty of you in.

To do this means I am willing to give up my secrets, the shades of darkness. Love is total, so must be my surrender. I don't know what it is, but I know it is worth being. Being love. Let me shed my skin so I may know.

Now is the perfect moment. Eternity beckons.

Brother To Another

Repetition, of partition, of repetition... we have a mission and it is in our lifeblood to protect it.

These thoughts somehow fit together on the screen. We see them not as a whole, but as something broken, divided by words. This is how we see the world, fragmented. Writing is an excellent reflection of it; it comes from it, does it not? It is an interpretive dance without the movement of limbs. Instead, oil lifts up above water. Words come up on the screen, no, colored pixels. The brain is trained to remind us of that which we attribute meaning to, and what that meaning is. And ultimately that that meaning never really was inherent in what it was attributed to. That part's not a special feature, but it is part of the film. The movie ends, sometime.

Caught amongst the feelings of grandeur, is a little boy. He's wee tall, wee small, wee wee-wee. The youngster accompanies the desire for love every where he goes, but he knows the desire for love is simply a shard of amnesia, forgetting that what it is looking for is in itself. How then, could I describe to you, and to me, that love is within us? Here.

I know your every move, you know mine too. And off the screen falls a place of enlightenment, somewhere where you can't see where you are going but that you know you inhabit. Already, there's a search going on for shadows, in the night, for emotions that are hidden in the most obvious of places. If only you looked during the day, when there is light, when the streetlights were off. That way, you could actually see, because in the light, love is most visible. In darkness, love is still there, but it is not visible to you because you choose to see with your eyes instead of your heart.

So I ask you, the writer, the reader, the interpreter, you, to look up in the light. There is no more to your pity than your bones, your body, your weaknesses and grievances. No more to your anguish than what you invest in it. No more to your loss than your lack of recognition. The light fails to see these, and instead merely shines. One day, sooner, you will know that the light shines so bright because it does not shine through anything. And the day that you will know that will be the day that you are uplifted and you will see. The truth. All of it.

We already are brothers. I just don't know it, but you do. I'll find out though, and you will have already known and will still know and when we both know, we will rejoice because are brothers. And that moment will be, and is, now.

So tell me, how do you feel? If you let it all go, it will fall apart.

But now we both know that life remains. And that's love.

Child's Play

I remember when we were children. I remember it because that time has not ended. We are all walking around as if we had only learned how to a few short days ago and are discovering the world for the first time. Everything is amazing, even though we've seen it so many times before. Everything is just fantastic and fascinating, the tops of trees, the shine on windows, the clouds, the faces of the other children. Oh joy, childhood lasts a lifetime. We don't grow up, we just decide to abandon our innocence for irresponsibility. Mate, that decision is not practical or plausible. We are children, we walk the Earth hand in hand and we play together in so many locales and ways. It's so much fun to be. Adults don't exist, so don't fool yourself into thinking that we are old or that we are somehow mature inhabitants. Insecurity doesn't make you mature, but it makes you feel like a scared child who has let go of our hands. Don't worry though, you'll eventually stop crying and open your eyes. You are going to smile then because you'll realise we were always here for you, with open arms, ready to laugh with you once more. The disorientation will just serve as a joke for a while, and we'll get much entertainment out of it. Come on, we can laugh at anything.

Let's play with our building blocks. We can make so many things. If we put them one way we can make a pyramid, or another way and we can make a wall. We can fort ourselves around the bench and protect the doll on her throne. From the elements? I don't know from who? But psychology might be able to tell us what she is afraid of. Yes, I know she's a doll. We are playing pretend aren't we? Like when we used to play pretend when we pretended to be bus drivers. Oh, how fun that was. I had so many pencils, pens and felt tip pens. Excellent markers for roads; an experience that allowed me to visualise cityscapes. And back then, I did. And I didn't have a bus, so I used a toy car. Not Hot Wheels, but some tiny ones that probably broke very easily because the plastic was cheap. You could find them with the cheap cheap cheap gum. What a treat, ephemeral, but that was part of the deal. Cheap doesn't last long. But it lasted enough time, or else I would have lost my appetite and would have wanted to try my mum's or grandma's food afterward. But back to the vehicle sandbox, remember when I put my thumb and finger onto the car and drove it around the roads I had made? I'm smiling. I pressed a bit too much sometimes to the point that the small wheels either snapped or stopped working properly. That's okay. They were buses anyway, and when I went from room to room through those roads that led me to interesting and unlikely intersections in differently congested areas (traffic-wise), I could always stop by gas stations/repair stores/anything else I wanted them to be. What a simple time that was. I'm not quite as naive as I was back then. I don't believe in it anymore. I don't find roads as fascinating anymore. Sometimes traffic lights make me anxious.

But, as I was saying. This is all child's play. No one's really very grown up. We fight over things because we think that what we are fighting over matters. Politics, a toy car. Democracy, a rubber chicken. The sexualisation of young girls, flowers picked from the field. Homosexuality, the broken lead of a pencil. Choice, innocence. Close-minded people, honesty. Lies, telling the truth as the most natural thing. Loneliness, love. Fighting, smiling. Hell, heaven.

I want to make sure I get this. Salvation is here. The only reason I would be confused about salvation being here is if I was told that salvation was elsewhere, which I believed before but now realise I trusted someone who didn't trust themselves. But I know now. I am a child, a son.

Every Point On The Line

Child, young, standing in this very spot,
Holding the escaped rebellious red ball
Looks wide-eyed at what could be th'end all,
The headlights bright, breaks heard but screaming not.
The son frozen.

"You're a legend, awesome, fantastic, the best,"
To the slaughter he now goes with all the rest.
From the white winter tops, right down to the basement
He's fallen; an abyss mirrors his replacement.
Watch and learn.

Those lessons he's receiving, to deduct the jealous,
Will purge him all of masquerading mind-made madness
For his fate is written-thus, that no self-made can alter.
With his secrets revealed, unhiding, the son cannot falter.
Be homeward bound.

No three, no four, none can claim a prize not to be won
When brothers all connect, correct and create as one.
It is forth that they must bring their minds and hearts
To unite their worth, meaning into a sum of all parts.
The lone fall.

His ways to complicate have been lost and failed,
The rhythmic contemplation, despair has sailed
Upon some wavelengths unreal, to mouths of fear.
The boy saved, has no need to run but be here.
He is returned.

What roads he has crossed, derelict, with sorrow,
Are lessons that remind him the lack of tomorrow.
He did not write himself into his being, but played a role,
An amnesia that he had to forget, to return to what is whole.
And he remains.

Victim Of Circumstance

Just like a dream, life is not what it seems. What happens when you go to high school in your first trimester, and you know no one and are finding it difficult to make friends because the others label you based on how you behave? What happens if one of those early days you feel belittled, emotionally crushed because who you hoped you would be did not turn out to be the reality that others saw when they looked at you? What about if on that same day, you feel deprived and lonely, on the brink of tears as you walk across a busy intersection, facing the world with an ephemeral visage, when a car speeds from the road ahead and smashes into another car only a few metres away from your little body? How stricken do you feel when you hear the sound of metal clashing, of glass shattering and scattering, of a baby suddenly bursting out crying? How do you feel when for the first few seconds after the shocking accident, your tongue numbs and your expression whitens as you look at the wreckage? And then what of the baby who wants reassurance that he or she is alive? What happens when you walk away, because the weight of the day's prison sentence leaves you unable to help because you think you might do more harm than good? Would you say life sucks? Jokingly, I might have, but I never came to the conclusion that, I would learn four years later, Veronica Mars came to when commenting on Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man". Her words, "Life's a bitch until you die," spoken like a philosophy to be adopted and lived by as a sort of life motto, a proof that there is a reason for the madness that life sucks, because it sucks. This pseudo-logic did not occur to me in such a formulated and cynical format, not only because I did not know what cynical meant, but because I still had expectations of how my life would turn out. After all, I purposely chose to go to a good public high school, mine being a 'college', despite the large distance that I had to cover with a bus each day. I ventured it was worth more to go to a place where it appeared that academics were valued highly, because that's where I would fit. I was brainy, smart, intelligent, a brainbox. I knew answers to questions in class, not because I went home everyday and did homework and extra study for five hours - I don't think I've ever done that. My tool, which others mistook for my secret, was my ear. I listened, because in class I was brought up with the idea that you were meant to listen, absorb information. So I did. Others, probably brought up in different types of cages and regimes, zoned in and out. Because my prowess allowed me to excel, even in the reputable academic environment of my high school, I had a goal to strive for, to be the top. I had come to school to learn, so that's just what I did.

But academics was certainly not the biggest lesson I would learn. My parents stressed that it was imperative for me to do well, meaning academically, and me being a good little boy did as they said, though not directly because they said it. Their influence on my values went past academics, but performance at an academic level was a strong core of those imprints. I soon found out, however, that academics was not of the highest priority to other students, which made it difficult for me to bond with others. I was timid, I didn't really know how to get along with people. Awkwardness was an idea that was previously alien to me but somehow entered my consciousness and vocabulary, and sort of then became an excuse to try relate to other people, sometimes by lying about myself. The magnifying glass I can now place on my high school experience shows me that I didn't know how to make friends and my unwillingness to go out of my boundaries slightly halted the development of my social skills beforehand. When it was time to attend my 20-minute-away by bus school, it was clear that the social world is something I would become a member of, warts and all.

My English teacher in my first year, Year 9, came to me one lunchtime. I was sitting down on the wooden steps, alone with my sandwich, looking at the library, not knowing if I really was allowed to go in there and scared to ask for fear of rejection. I may have been on those steps because once the bell would ring, probably more than twenty minutes away, I would be ready to enter class, the door being just a metre behind me. I sat and gnawed and chewed and swallowed. She came to me, maybe she sat down next to me. Already having answered questions in her class, in her and the pupils' eyes, I was 'good at English', so she knew I had my academics sorted out. If my memory persists, she asked me how I was doing. Don't remember what I replied. She then may have asked me about friends, and I said I didn't have any. She introduced me to the actual concept, then, that high school was half-academics, half-social. There was an element in this experience I never consciously concentrated on. I never had to until then, because I always found somebody to bond with, at least superficially, to fulfill my friendship 'needs'. In high school, the rules of the game had changed, because the other students weren't willing to give me a chance. Judgment had set in - you make your friends by finding common things between each other. As a shy boy, I never got to the stage of sharing what I liked. Assumptions were made that I studied a lot, so I was a nerd, a geek, whatever. No one knew me, no one cared to know me, nobody knew themselves. Some of this realisation came to me at that time. I behaved a certain way around my classmates, and like a missile shield they were in defensive mode because they felt I fired at them by not bending to a status quo. I acted different to them, I got different marks, I talked differently. So people treated me differently - what else could I expect? This made me an outcast and within the first few days of this discovery, I went home and I cried. Simple: I hated myself and I wanted to change to be accepted because back then, I was nobody. I wanted people to like me. I wanted to be known, to have friends, to laugh out loud and to do the things the other kids were doing. I wanted to belong, so I had to change. I thought all I then had to do was change my behavior, an experiment which failed within the end of that first year at high school. I didn't know how to act like someone else. I didn't know how to add new imprints into my behavior, even though subconsciously I was doing it all the time. Unwilling to make that conscious decision, I had surrendered partly to the idea that I could not change. But it was more like a step of procrastination, because I felt that if I knew how to change, then I could change. So the process of figuring out the how was the aim I had set myself, though not in those words.

My arrival from intermediate into the much bigger pond of fish that was high school made me more aware of my behavior. Hints were dropped during childhood, by my cousin, by friends, by my mother and father, at times even by the mirror. But the bombs came in 2005, when the people around me were old enough to use labels that actually dealt my self-esteem some serious damage. They were not wise enough to understand what they were really doing, but they were able to use them so they could achieve their unconscious goal of separation. I acted differently. That didn't make me less of a person, but I was sure made to feel that way. I remember once I was in science, and the weapon that everyone used on me hadn't been used for some time - which gave me an opportunity to recharge myself. It thus came to be quite a memorable blow when I was again labeled that way when we were making phones out of tin cans and string. I was paired with some guy that was quieter than the norm. He spoke into the tin, and his words traveled through our white string into my tin can. At the time I was smiling, having fun, child fun. He asked me a question and through that stealthily dropped his bomb. I quickly replied with a negative answer, but the shock waves of the blast went through me. My 'no' was almost a tremor. I felt ashamed for the rest of the day, my innocence gone.

It's true that people are allowed to ask questions, but I did not recognise that at the time. To me, it was painful to be asked questions about who you are that were marginalising. It was not 'who are you?', but 'are you...' and they didn't know any better. Neither did I.

But I came through. At one point I wanted to be a victim, I wanted to be pitied. I thought it might gain me favour, morale, but nothing like that can make you whole. High school, especially at the beginning, was hard. It's hard to be told by people around you that you aren't enough. It's hard when you believe them. It's hard when you think illusions are real, and when they do too. But suffering is a great teacher. One way, or another, life is the greatest teacher. It will teach you exactly what you need, in the best way possible. You are allowed to object, to resist, but you only would if you were scared, if you believed that there was another way. This method creates friction, pain, and its discomfort then becomes your teaching method for the lesson that life tried to teach you in the first place. One way, or another, life teaches you what you need to know. How can I possibly say then, that life sucks? I can't say it and speak the truth. Veronica Mars had her own circumstances which she had to deal with, and in her pain and confusion, she made her conclusion. "Life's a bitch until you die." She believed it, and in her representative power as a human being, it came to be her filter through which she saw her experience. You may believe it too, which is why life hurts you and you feel victimised. After all, so long as life is a bitch, the bitch has to live up to her name. You'll still learn, but in an unpleasant way, until you discover that there is a much more effective and authentic path you can take. As students, the best thing to do is learn. Then we teach. It is with hope then, that I recommend learning truth before attempting to teach it, because once truth is learned, life will teach it through you, for the benefit of all.

The Little Boy On Both Sides Of The Door

Naked are you? Your fingers are clutching down on the keys of the piano like a foothold. Why are you trying to anchor yourself amidst such a flood? You know you'll drown. Don't you worry, you don't have to go with the flow, no matter where the waters lead. There's a spirit in you, a fire, a focus that's inextinguishable and yet here you are, trying to force the world around to stop changing by fixing yourself in one spot.

You are not gravity. You're not.

But you don't need to be. Surrender and you shall be set free. You can swim, but you don't need to unless you let the waters take you. Where they go is where you are.

And here is where the key turns inside the lock and the door lies shut. You know, I probably closed that door myself unconsciously because I feared what would be on the other side. I thought it'd demolish me. Somewhere on my side of the door there's a scared little boy with tears in his eyes. He looks at me all the time, and whenever I am near the door begins uttering a cry - when I touch the key he moves his little body forward, ready to jump and hold on to me, and his expression turns grave. He doesn't want it open. He wants to stay there in his corner, safe with his headless teddy bear. I don't know what to do, because when he cries, I cry. I feel his pain, every chord that strikes within him I feel. I am stuck in this dark room, key in the lock. I want to open the door, but the little boy's fear grips me right before I bring myself to turn the handle and I am trapped. I cannot move, for fear that the boy will perish and thus that I will perish. He doesn't want to fall, he doesn't want his teddy bear to leave him. He doesn't want me to abandon him, but I know that I can't take him with me. I know what is beyond the door, but I am finding it difficult to remember as I am in the clouds, the evaporation of the little boy's tears, with teddy bear heads floating around me. I must break through. I must turn the key, turn the door handle and open the door, then step out.

On the other side, there is another little boy standing. He's smiling. There are no corners here, no shadows to hide under, no walls to lean on, no ceiling to cower under. There is total freedom, something which I cannot understand.

Who am I? If on this side of the door I am a coward, a fool, a scared little boy, then who could I possibly be on the other side?

There, I am whole.