Chasing Nirvana

Twenty (Jimmy's Notebook)

Dear Nate,

I know you told me to write down my thoughts, but my thoughts are not my own; they are the products of unfortunate events of the past. Remember when you first brought me to the creek and we saw those mourning doves? I think of them often nowadays, especially when I am alone, and think about how nice it would be to become a bird and fly away.

I want to be a free bird even though I know that birds aren’t exactly free. They worry about their territories and food and mates just as we do. A bird is a human, and a human is a bird. At night, I hear the sounds of owls moving in and out of the shadows, the flap-flap-flap of their wings echoing around my head. They may sound free but I know they are not. The free of a pair of wings is an illusion created by humans who wishes to be something other than themselves. And I am weird for obsessively going on about birds.

Jimmy.

 

Dear Nate,

Someone could stab you with a thousand knives and leave a thousand scars, but deep down, beneath all the scabs and the protective walls that scream out your fear and loathing of the person, love still runs deep. A nurse in one of the rehabilitation centers once told me that humans are made to love, even if they love in different forms. I was bounded to misery the moment I fell in love with Ryder, and I will continue be bound by that until the day I die, or achieve a state of mind where I no longer feel attached to anything on this earth. 

Ryder took a part of me with him when he died. A part of me got shut off, got cut off, got thrown away, and buried in the dirt with him. Because, in spite of everything that happened, he was still someone I was close to, someone in the same boat, someone who felt my pain as though it was his own.

There is no hope for someone like, Nathaniel, and you must not waste your energy on trying to scoop up spilt water. In the same way the water is absorbed into the earth, I am absorbed into my darkness. The only way since Ryder’s death, I’ve realized, the only way to find peace. Except that I don’t know how.

Jimmy.

 

Dear Nate,

I woke up one morning to find that it had snowed during the night, and that the snow had frosted on the glass of my windows. I sat up on my bed and stared at the blockaded window for a long while but no matter how hard I stared, the snow didn’t melt. If I turned out the light now, my room was swarthed entirely in darkness with the exception of the strange, icy glow that being emitted by what used to be my window. For the first time in ages, I found myself missing yet another thing that I had taken for granted: a day.

I pretended that the day was still the night and that my life was okay.

Jimmy.

 

Dear Nate,

“You can always talk to me,” you said. “I care. Even if I can’t help you, I can listen.”

But we both know how big that burden was. I’m not sure how to share my problems with you, because here is the problem with sharing: it become their problem too. And none of us were really ready for that, were we? No one can worry for two people. Worrying is an incredibly selfish thing to do, and we must do it alone.

When I felt that emptiness weighing me down, I’d pick up the phone, thinking I’d call someone, but I never did. Probably never will.

I don’t know how to put it words. I guess, if I really tried, I would say it was like a big, empty hall. You’re not inside it; you are it. There are rows and rows of chairs inside, darkened by the shadows of each other until they were an entity to themselves. A body of empty chairs. Sometimes a dash light flickers through the hall’s solitary set of doors, and you get a glimpse of this or that chair being spotlighted. You think to yourself, this is it. Someone has come to keep you company. But the lights move on. No one of them ever stays, and you find yourself back in the dark, holding onto that body of empty seats. They are oh so heavy, such a burden.