All Rivers End at the Sea

The water from the river was finding a path through the weaves of his jeans, and within an instant, the briskness of winter greeted his legs, yet it changed nothing in him. He had started by submerging his boots in the shallowest edges, looking out to the community of trees that watched him a stone’s throw away across the other side. But he craved more than the disconnected partition created by the boots: he wanted to feel it again, to remember the bond between body and mind. His eyes were now shutting the world out while his fingers immersed themselves, creating a pain that seemed almost artificial, as if the water did not truly exist. His mind had taken him to a place of incredible isolation, where he felt utterly removed from his physical existence. He walked further into the embrace of the flowing body, where his feet carried themselves along the riverbed, as if without his request. His mind was in turmoil, yet he continued to try and console himself,

‘Can you not stand as an observer to the feelings you have? Can you not see through the chaotic churning of your contemplations? If the violent river is your mind, why would you choose to drown in the turbulent eddies of your thoughts? Surely you can be passive to your situation, to watch from the river bank and regard the emotions you are dealing with for their influence on your actions. You are at a beautiful point in your life. You are looking directly at the irrationalities of love. The darkness that envelopes you in your isolation is your ability to recognise the falsities of societal love. You have loved someone with the intent of a lifetime of happiness, and they left you. Can you not see that the feelings of love and of pain are one and the same until time restores the equilibrium? Is your desire to love not just one and the same as your desire to have meaning, to find a God?’

“What are you doing?” The voice of a lifelong friend brought an end to his peculiar experience. He turned to walk towards the edge but his feet did not respond as they did to carry him out there, and after stumbling into the water, he managed to keep only his head dry, appearing as a dog would to swim to solid ground. “You idiot, what the hell was that?” he said in a tone that was an ugly combination of anger and pity, spoken with the false sincerity of a parent to their crying child. “I thought you might be down here, come back to the house and get warm, you bloody liability.” No words were said in return, and the two men began to walk in silence along the path back to society. They had known each other for forty years, they had lived in other cities, sometimes with minimal contact, but had managed to settle very close to one another for the past few years. After stopping to wring out the cold water from his jacket, he turned to his friend and said,

“There cannot be a difference between the woman that beds more than just her husband and the man that cannot return home without a stomach churning alcohol, without lungs gargling tar from the after work smoke. These are all primitive methods of a hedonistic nature. So there is no difference between the skydiver and the gluttonous man in the seeking of instantaneous pleasure. So we should not be angry at adultery, for it is natural. We should be forgiving of the person for merely being human. Maybe we should even celebrate it for we will never be robots of divine and faultless creation, after all, the real problem lies with the other half in the relationship: when the concept of ownership over a human being is threatened.”

“Come on, let’s just get you home. You’re wet, tired, and not quite yourself.”

He had now started to shiver, and his clothes seemed to hang from him like a lead weight from his shoulders, making each step slower and more pronounced. His friend walked half a step in front, desperately trying to speed up the process of getting to the warm confines of a home. The path they walked was a thin concrete line that wiggled amongst the trees, where eventually one of the many lines would emerge into the suburban sprawl to which both men owned a moderately sized estate, relatively close to one another. Eventually his slow feet ceased to produce even a slow amble, and the two men stopped at a split in the path. His friend pretended to ignore that he was no longer in movement, and began to walk the shortest line home. However, he reluctantly turned around to notice that a decision was being made. The disheveled man began to take the alternative route, knowing that it was both longer and more unpleasant, resulting in taking possibly ten minutes longer and passing through a waste management site. He thought to himself,

‘If I can’t find the beauty in the ugliness, in the sterility of monotony then there really is no hope for my future. Maybe the reason she left was because I didn’t appreciate the things I didn’t like about her, that I didn’t learn to love and accept her for everything she is.’

After emitting a sigh, his friend crossed over to walk alongside him. With his arms wrapped around his body, he was shaking quite violently now, but he maintained the ability to ignore his primitive signals. Once his eyes lay upon the mounds of rubbish through the barbed wire fence he smiled and began to picture the view with a fresh mind, without assigned meanings and labels. He saw the great machines that shifted the dirt and the trash, and he felt the presence of overwhelming beauty from the image of rust, the peeling paint, the magnificent piles of packaging, food waste and the endless assortments of objects that lay in between. On the furthest side of the fence, rising up from the ground was an array of pipes, like a great tower in the sky. At the top a large flame was lit, burning the methane to reduce the smell for the surrounding area. He paused to watch the convection currents swirling the smoke into the sky, dispersing for the environment to control. As the path began to diverge from the fence line, he walked up and put his hand through a small gap, immersing his hand into a pile of dirt that towered almost three times overhead. He grasped a fistful, and immediately felt the incredible textures of the soil, with varying grain size and composition. As he began to carry his sample along the path, he immediately noticed the amount that was trying to escape his clutches to return to its origin below the surface.

“What ownership do we ever really have? She couldn’t have ever belonged to me like an object you can buy, even a ring is nothing but temporary. I never really knew her, and I can’t pretend to either: she is a human being and therefore uncalculatable, unpredictable, irrational and no matter how much time we spent together I could never understand her mind. If you accept that there is no ownership then this brings pain, as people can’t sleep knowing that another man is plunging in the pools of their ‘woman’, because we can’t accept our insufficiencies… Somebody out there will fuck her a million times better than me, even the sentimental side of sex can be discovered with other people. I am nothing in the permanence of this person’s life so why pretend? I’m just a replaceable part in a continuous machine.”

“I don’t know but for God sake stop thinking about this, or it will be the end of you.”

He started to become agitated at the lack of response from his friend.

“Why does everyone hide from sadness, why do we try to purge our negative emotions? They should be an equal part of us that we learn to love unflinchingly. We are only human from the pain that we feel, we can only grow from the tears we have shed, and our lives can only progress when we learn to accept our sufferings. This is the reason why people break down: they feel utterly alone with their darkness, in their isolation with negativity they cease to have the ability to express a substantial part of their individuality, a side of us which manifests itself in our feelings of despair, of anger, of angst and of regret. We should expect people to try to kill themselves after trying to resist and ignore such emotions, I’m amazed more people don’t do it. I feel completely shut out by society with my feelings of misery, suffering and suicide.”

He paused, looking at the back of his friends head as he continued to walk onwards. He had intended to follow on from his conversation, but listening to the silence that existed between the two friends, he became enraged. After a few minutes of walking without a word spoken, he shocked his friend by suddenly shouting,

“Why can’t you just fucking talk about this? I’m fucking sick of you drones. You go about your lives hoping for a Hollywood ending, but aiming for nothing but a good job, a big house and a successful family. What is everyone seeking, is it all just about money? Or is it about comfort? We shouldn’t waste our precious lives aiming for happiness, because it will never come. I’m forty-five, and what the hell have I done with my life? I built a house of cards, and it was destroyed overnight in a storm, washed away to the sea, where everything inevitably leads.”

They had now arrived at the house, where the front door had been opened, and with a look of both bewilderment and misery, the friend turns to the distraught man,

“Go inside and get warm, I will see you tomorrow. Please just try to let things settle, don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.”

With a face filled with disgust, he closed the door to the world, climbed the stairs, and without removing a single item of his wet clothing, he crawled into bed. The curtains allowed a single slice of light to penetrate the room, such that as he pulled the covers around his shivering body, he curled up on his side to face the bedside table, where a picture of his ex-wife still stood firmly.

“I’m sorry, you must have struggled with this in your solitude, I merely hope that it was not for years. I could have been so much more for you. If I didn’t see you as my possession, I could have helped you through this. I don’t blame you for being with other people, you were only trying to find something which I did not provide for you: compassion for our differences, more devotion to your needs and a greater appreciation of the time we spent together. I really am so very sorry.”