Beauty

                A model, a superstar, with thighs so perfectly chiseled, breasts push-up, lips full, and hair shimmering is not beautiful.  Life in perfect bliss, a heaven where all your wishes come true is not beautiful.  Imagine someone swimming.  Twirling and swirling in a pool, two people preforming a dance, doing circles around each other.  Imagine the perfectly enacted strut of a business man, high power, mindset, determination steadfast.  Imagine a swan gliding across a lake, beak down and body slender.  These do not show beauty.  Beauty is the actuality of swimming.  Swirl and twirl, these two bodies so elegant, still must push their way through the water.  They wave their hands and kick their legs, they sweat and they breathe hard as they bob up and down the surface.  The man walks awkwardly, stepping forward and realizing he forgot to kiss his wife, miss stepping.  A swan must survive in the wild, kill when needed, and take pain when hindered.  The swan’s heart beats, pumping blood through its body.  The swan’s lungs contract and retract, filtering oxygen from the air, rusting the swan’s body oh so slowly.  Beauty is this naturality of the universe.  Beauty is the mistake.  Birth is beautiful, pain, blood, tears, and all, birth creates a life which will spend many years being hurt, crying, and feeling lonely.  Birth creates this life which sees joy and loves and let’s live because it knows what pain is.  Beauty is this silent struggle, beauty is birds calling in a forest each surviving another day and singing all the while.  The pop songs and perfect pictures, the romance novels written so perfectly so as to make you want them, the fatty foods which we all love so much; these things show no beauty.  They are the essence of all which we consider good, all which is the light, but with none of the shadows.  Yin without yang and this is ugly, unnatural.  An apple is beautiful for it is sweet and savory while being tart and rigid.  An old guitar is beautiful for it lights into the room with glee and music while twinging and buzzing, sounds of a worn instrument.  Women are beautiful, imperfect skin, blemishes, periods, and faults of personality.  Men are beautiful no matter how strong or who calls them “a man,” despite their decaying age or their laughable youth.  Humanity is beautiful and nature is beautiful.  Spring is beautiful for flowers are born and bees buzz, yet rain each day, winds, illness, and a muck of backyards.  Winter colds, glistening snows; Fall oranges, slowly concealing of life; Summer greens, Summer hot, hot, blistering sun.  It is beauty which is the two of one.  Beauty is none of the perfections without all of the failures.  No superstar is beautiful without the years of practice and patience.  God does not need free will to justify pain.  God needs pain to justify glee. 

Traffic Light and Dylan

The traffic light blinked off and on.  Red, blink, red, blink, red…  Dylan’s blinker flashed in tune, indicating that the car would soon be veering right.  No cars were on the road.  It was night and nothing much was happening at all.  Dylan just sat there.   He had just dropped off his oldest son, Bobby, at football.  Another day, another practice, some more driving.  Tomorrow he would wake up and go to work.  That’s what he’d do.  Wake up, go to work, come home, drive Bobby to football, go to sleep.  Another day would pass, he would get just that much older; the lines in his face would deepen and his bones would be that much sorer.   He would wake up and do the same thing all over, again and again and again.  He would wake up and his hair would become grayer, the love for his wife shallower, the caring for his children bitterer.  He would wake up to the alarm, buzzing and awful, screech from Hell, and clamour out of bed.  He would wake up.  Wake up, Dylan… 

          A car honked behind him.  Dylan was lost.  Where was he?  Blinking red light, that’s right, forever blinking red light.  Red, blink, red, blink, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, blink…  Dylan thought he was hallucinating; for surely the light had stayed red, but then he saw it was just the same as ever, red and blink over and over, and he knew he had been hallucinating.  Just the same, one more thing to add to the list of problems.  The car’s lights stared at Dylan’s back, angry that he had not moved.  Dylan stared at the light, watching it blink in tune with his lights, in tune with his eyes opening and closing.  The road was empty ahead, a car waited behind.  Eventually he heard a shout from the side and the car drove past, a finger was shown but Dylan wasn’t sure why, or how, or when…?...?  That was the question, right?   Something was up.  He felt crazy, all these thoughts floating around completely unattached from ideas, like decapitated heads floating in the cloud, clouds of headless bodies.  He shook his head.  Oh, the light, the light, right,  the blinking of the light.  That’s what’s up, up, up, and away towards the sky, towards God. 

God?  Was he real, would he do this to Dylan, all this nothingness?  This dull existence, this decrepted lifestyle.  Everyday the same thing.  How could he coup.  The light blinked on, God’s voice spoke, yes, no, yes, no, yes… God doesn’t know.  God doesn’t know why God had made Dylan this way, if god had made Dylan this way.  God is just another chump on the street, watching Dylan waste his life away.  God had mae Bobby and Mommy and Wife, all once loved, but now, with Dylan’s growing weariness, Dylan’s decaying mind, Dylan no longer cared.  This God did, but did not know.

 Why would it be Dylan sitting in a car on an empty street.  Of the people in the world, why him?  God had no answer, Dylan had no answer.  He realized could go off and leave, could go straight, what if he did go straight?  Bobby would miss him, at least, he guessed he would miss him.  What if he went left?  Dylan supposed then Bobby wouldn’t care, but his wife might miss him.  So hard to decide, which universe to choose.  What was the answer to all his problems…? Right, the light.  The light existed still, solid and in front of him.  God couldn’t say, he couldn’t say, and it wasn’t Bobby’s fault. 

          Go forward or go straight or go left, that’s the trouble.  He could go either way, change his whole life around.  Would that be fair to Bobby?  Wife?  Would it even be fair to himself to just leave?  Would he get bettered, would his clouded, shambled, mind regain health?  Something troubled him.  It was the light?  No, not the red, the red made sense.  It was the left.  It wasn’t Bobby’s fault, but it might be wife’s.  ‘Mid-life depression happens for a reason, you know,’ God would say.  So, if it isn’t Bobby’s fault going left would be the answer, because then Bobby won’t miss him.  Right?  Right, oh, right, he had to go right.  Left wasn’t an option.  This wasn’t a land of dream-believe, this was life and life meant choices and choices meant responsibility and responsibility meant going right.  But still, Dylan day-dreamed about the dreamed day where right wasn’t the right answer.  Home wasn’t the house to be.  Wife wasn’t the woman to have.  None of it made sense.  Why go right when right might not be right.  It was still his choice life and responsibility aside.   Figured that’s how it goes though, choices and decisions.   That’s how life is.  Might be his choice, and that was nice, but he did eventually have to choose or he’d be stuck at the light forever.  Decayed mind, depression, unloved wife, football son Bobby aside, he had to make a choice and move his car from where it was parked.  Thus the car moved from its stationary position.

Past Self

I am writing this because I am not sure if I will remember the next time.  I want it somewhere.  If my plans go accordingly, then I will be able to read this in the future and remember my lives.  If not then I am lost in the sea of all humanity and will never find out the truth. 

            I want to start by administering some tests for my future self, to get the ball rolling.  If you are really me then these things will ring true.  You will like the colour yellow.  For some reason yellow will bring you feelings of cuddling and the whish of cool air on a summer night.  These things have stuck with us throughout the years.  You will probably have brown hair and be attracted to other people with brown hair, though these are not
guaranteed.  Your eyesight is not always the best, either from your nature or something about you which lasts.  Also music follows you.  In no life have I ever been without music, I think I might be dead without it and this thought is one of the few each past that I remember has had, even the animal versions.  You will probably also be scared of cats a bit, or at least superstitious, and like rodents.  You’ve been a rat and a mouse a few times.  It is possible I am wrong, I understand very little despite all my work, but I believe that these things in some way will last, especially the music bit.  If All is willing you will still have a thirst for the answers as I do.

            It’s going to sound crazy, especially if what I have said so far gives you feelings of déjà vu, but you are not the only version of yourself.  You have ben reincarnated many times in the past and I know this because for some reason I can remember them all.  Never can in a past life have I been able to recall the events of my lives so vividly.  I do not think it is normal.  I think God made a mistake, if God exists.  I searched my whole life for the reason why.  Some have called me crazy but I have tried to keep a secret and have thusfar avoided the nuthouses.  I have not found anything.  Is there a God?  Heaven?  Does He know about me?  I know there are answers.  Maybe in the future we will know more. (1)

            I had to run.  That was the first thing I had to do.  Run for my life.  They found me, the FBI I think, some sort of federal looking people.  Please don’t freak out, God knows I did.  We don’t know anymore, we will never know more.  Take the book and burn it.  Burn it quick.  Too many of us have died for it, but I guess you’ll know that now. 

God made a mistake.

(1)     It took a long time to translate this, but I have it and have rewritten it for the future selves to use as they need.  You will find this book, locked, buried and hidden deep in the Everwood.  This place is still your home, I was drawn to it without any memory and I believe you will be too.  The key is at your first home, the one the original writer is from, Italy.  Look under the rocks near the stream, you’ll see it and you’ll know.  Follow the music.