| Recent Novels |
| Recent Stories |
| Recent NonFiction |
| Recent Poetry |
|
|
|
|
Taken from Nowhere
By James Liu
© 2000 James Liu. All rights reserved.
________________________________________________________________________
Introduction
“Hi. My name is James. And I’m going to have a great day today.”
I looked away from the mirror with approbation of who I was. I walked out
of my room completely content with how perfect it was. Not a mote of
squalor could be detected by our cognitive senses. Like most preeminent
people, I only know part of the whole. Maybe it’s because I’m not there,
not caring, or just to preoccupied with my own exacting life. Or at least
this is what I lead people to believe, people like me. I look forward to my
school day each day. Enough of this pretense.
I have reunited with the walls that I’ve grown up with. It encloses me as
a jail but the simple nostalgia of which memories I’ve given to this room
relieve what stresses may have become of my day. I don’t expect to be a
precursor for the world or for anyone to exalt my existence. I’m not a one
of a kind human being who’s so unique and ineffable. I don’t try to be
someone who’s life is so sad that you want to reach your hand out to pick me
up. And I’m not one who wants your pity to depend on. I live my life
chaotically, I’m constantly indignant to the monolithic world around me and
constantly too indolent to care.
Resting on my bed, I close my eyes and curl up under the thick munificent
comforter blankets. I wonder, how many days will go on end where I walk in
my mundane life and fall asleep morosely. Each day my moribund life grows
older and I digress from the motif of life. I suppose I am one to conspire
with the complicity of questioning life's reasons. What is life, a cliché
that we are all cognizantly unable to answer. Cogent reasons have lead us
to settle for pseudo-tenets. Life shows no clemency, yet we compare life to
being in it’s purest form in the embodiment of nature. Nature shows no
clemency, it runs its cycles with or without you. You dare not ask for
nature to appease its ways for the likes of a human, because you know that
it will not grant such a savory delight to your apprehensive life. Which
brings us back to the main idea, is life the pain we are coerced to go
through. When we are coalesced to suffer as one, does that bring mankind
closer together to share what life holds or does it circumvent us further
into fighting one another.
Life is not coherent, and yet the colloquial statements displayed by a
child holds a more compelling meaning than an aphorism said by the worlds
oldest man. When someone with so little known use of his cognitive
abilities can show us only two expressions, happiness and sadness, then
those are the two we must base what life is on. They have only two ways to
show their evanescent feelings in the purest form, they know nothing, but
still they have a predilection to what they know and want. This shows the
innate abilities that come with the young, not the old who have been
callused and shaped by the society that binds us. Still I sense an inert
force that doesn’t want me to explore these areas that even the select
esoteric tried to decide upon while along the lines of being profane.
I toss in my bed. I roll over and look at my clock shaded by papers of
long past. I squint my eyes to understand what it has been commanded to do,
be a subject to my room, in which I, it’s master hold it’s knowledge. It’s
time suggests 1:44 a.m. but I know time doesn’t exist, just like what our
lives are supposed to mean. I feel a burning within my eyes, I blink them,
and again, but they no longer have the robust ability to explore such a
room. I stop moving my unresting body, I tried to envelope my body with
stagnation, only to fail as my physical body could be controlled, but my
mental, never. It is an old static room, one where it has drained even my
own life and developed one of it’s own. It has it’s own personality, yet
always shall it be staunch and steadfast to me.
With such a profound life, I feel my words have been corrupted already by
the society that condemns those who live in it to the extent of becoming
prodigal in its ways to ascertain it’s goals of submissiveness. Though those
who live in it, condone such a society for it’s flawless resolute of
producing such able citizens. Again we are brought back to why children are
the victims of society’s rigorous ability to coerce you into following
their spurious morals. If they can enter a child's mind before they have the
ability and freedom of their life, then it would be contaminated, raped by
society and the imprints are forever. Still what is life, and how could
such a life give life to those imprisoned to such bondage without
understanding the consequences of doings so.
Do we base now, what we call life, on happiness or sadness, or is life the
experience that comes with growing old. If we base it on sadness, do look
for sadness further in order to achieve our lives? Sadness if absorbed into
our systems would only bring turmoil into our lives, so if it brings
emotional instability to our lives, then our life has to be defined as
something other. Sorrow and morose can be seen in our experiences with
life. Experiences, an aged may argue is what makes life coherent, each
discrete experience is connected and thus pronounces what life is.
I must with all sympathy, once again preclude this form of definition to
travel by societies will. I have a predilection, an affinity by the natural
world, to claim that life is what we know through happiness and bliss. A
euphoric feeling holds what we base everything else in the world upon, it
defines what we feel, what we love, what the meaning of life has become to
you, and you alone.
As such a thought permeates through the social blockade which shelters my
mind, I sudden shiver with a realization that I would neither squander nor
profuse to the world which I know. I revere such a prodigious thought to a
height that even pondering such a thought could be disrespectful to what the
meaning it encompasses. How is it possible for something so true, to be in
a form so powerful, that it not allows you to think of it without feeling an
energy flow through you that takes the right of life away from your hands
and into it’s.
There was no way I could sleep this night. I couldn’t find my pristine
peace of mind to calm my soul down enough to allow sleep. It had already
clasped my soul in it’s iron hands, my mind was lost and until I find the
answer I had no map. I had to digress further into this revelation, or this
hysteria.
Tossing again back and forth in my bed, I couldn’t go on with the
insecurity of unknowing the time. I glanced to see 3:23 a.m. I felt like
something was forcing me to understand what I couldn’t. It needed me to, it
was pressuring this information into my mind at a time where I could not
comprehend it or allow it further entrance and all I wanted was a period of
respite. How can such a thought expect me to allege this ambiguous and
desultory volition of what life is supposed to mean. Is my mind telling me
what life is, or is life burgeoning the truth in order to give a polemic
stance on what it should be.
Indifference was not an option, was I to believe that happiness to be the
erudite understanding of how to forever now perceive life. Is there a
precedent for me to follow and study, or is this precipitate vision to
furtively reveal itself and become a precept to spawn the broach of further
the engenderment of the aesthetic life we must lead. The silently
vociferous screams in my mind were in a vitriolic battle over the pertinent
topic. Yet I could not forbear the thoughts that entered and I became a
culprit when I fomented to forgo my own sleep deprivation to understand the
didactic energy that pushed my mind to understand life.
I threw at it, my best pernicious rebuttals while trying not to transgress
beyond what it allowed. Happiness is a state of mind, which is effected by
the milieu microcosm that we are surrounded with and live inside of. To be
happy can be receiving a lollipop, a pat on the back, or to be given love.
Which one is the true happiness in which life is based upon, where life can
bond and create our hopes and memories. I wish to cry out, to call someone
who wasn’t their, in hopes that when I tell them this ineffable
understanding that they will comply and know what I say. I need a fraternal
bond to another being in order to also take in what this means, before I
come frenetic and end up with those who believe they can live without
restraint, but only to be restrained. Although it is I, who must understand
this, before I can even begin to assist others in such a truth. Is my mind
telling me what I know, or is their some force that is constantly straining
my already indigent mind with the capability of understanding something that
shouldn’t be allowed. I need an outlet, like the river, the lake, it can
only attain so much before some of it must be transferred to another source
to help it hold it’s maximum, without destroying the land it rests on.
Happiness in a pure form, happiness in a superficial form, or is happiness
only happiness no matter what caliber it is felt at. I cry out, into
oblivion and the ubiquity of this universe for some ability to founder at
this new found realization, but to be as of a philanthropist, for is love
not a form of happiness? If I could love what is so plentiful, and believe
in something which holds the power of tyranny. Then won’t I find the zenith
of life and live it?
I cannot figure a better way for what happiness truly means, it’s not an
emotion as we’ve mistaken it to be. It is of a higher value, it is the
ethereal definition, the building blocks of what our lives are composed of.
It is the source that compels us to live our life, for the search for
happiness and to attain it allows us to become more human. Being happy
allows for us to bring meaning, a meaning which composes the orchestra of
life that we portray. Even though sadness my scar our lives indefinitely,
it is happiness which allows us to grow, life grows, and it grows, and
beyond death happiness allows life to grow still.
My eyes close, and I sleep.
Epilogue
“Hi. My names is James. I like strawberries, they make me happy.”
I looked away from the mirror, took a bite, and I was happy.
