A long time ago, or maybe not so long ago, there was a sad boy. He grew up into a sad man. No one ever wants this. No one but sad people ever want it for the people they like the least. He spent his days without talking to people, his nights without looking at stars. The only thing that he looked forwards to was sleep. Sleep was as close to happiness as he could find. The world went away, and he went away with it.
It wasn't so simple, though. For he would dream. The dreams he had made his sleep broken and uneasy. Mornings came and he couldn't hide in sleep. By the time mornings came, he'd usually been shaken from the dark hideaway that the sleep was by the dreams which haunted that sleep. He dreamt of everything from falling into autumn valleys from high places, even being so small that he was tossed from a car on a bridge to being imprisoned in strange facilities of his psyche where he was kept by inabilities. Dreams where he did wrong and wasn't found out and dreams where he had done no wrong but was prosecuted were equally effective in upsetting him.
When he woke though, the regularity of the sadness was perhaps more cruel. He felt the life slipping from him, moment by moment, hour by hour. While the idea of killing himself, finding that ultimate sleep had crossed his mind, he never fully engaged it. It would come just as quickly as a morning on the scales of time he framed it all in. There was no need to rush something so permanent. What he knew was that something would give. Something had to give. If it was he that was to break, his mind to fissure and crumble, or his body to die a slow and wretched cancerous death or a fast and merciful heart attack or fatal stroke, then so be it. Otherwise, the universe would make room for him and he would be free.
What made him sick was the feeling of inability that plagued him. He was, in all likelihood, more than able, but he felt unable to extricate himself from his misery and death. Sometimes he read a story, a play, or watched a film that lit a light inside, that moved him to want more. He looked around him when he was forced to go outside and saw not much more than zombies of the modern age. Sure, he was a pessimist, but there was a reason. He couldn't rightly see that the status quo was anything but tragic. Even the games he played and the projects he took on for the sake of feeling like he was doing something were empty. He did it for someone else. It wasn't what he wanted, and it scared him.
Maybe he was losing the ability to want. Not in some enlightened buddhist way, but in a very sick way. To not want, never to be excited, never to feel alive were the characteristics of this loss. Even when he lived on heroin in England, his skin was pale, but there was something ghostly about him now. Like the scene in Back to the Future when Marty McFly is disappearing. That half-wayness of it all added to the unbearable weight of it all. He did retain a desire, though. One desire he knew, that he kept, that he would not be stripped of was to return to the light and levity that he once lived.
All that seriousness and certainty with which nearly everyone he knew ordered their lives would make him smirk. He knew, maybe all he knew, was that the universe was a joke, a blag, and that whatever was going to happen would or wouldn't and there wasn't much point in worrying about it. Thinking this way, he found himself starting a company that was presented as an offer to him. Knowing these things he found love and the beauty of New York when one is young and June comes. He loved planes. He loved the idea that one could buy tickets to other realities.
Sure, it was the same planet and the same people, but it was all different and, truthfully, at least to him, the priorities with which the people lived, while generally oriented the same, were different when it mattered. It mattered most when it came to relating. The way men & women looked at, spoke to, and handled each other. The way strangers did. The way that friends and the ways that colleagues regarded each other. They were different than in America. That was real.
The thought that any given telephone wire was there for as long as he was, give or take, and would be along after he was, give or take, was profound to him. It made him realize that the world, life, reality didn't need him. Extending this to the cosmos led directly to a more fundamental redux, but no one ever wanted to talk about that because there didn't seem to be much to talk about to them. Not to him. That was what was worth talking about more than anything else. It was all a comedy. Or a tragedy. Or both or fuck all.
This is what he missed. Men had all sorts of advice they were prone to give. He tolerated a lot of it, and had learned to entertain it. Maybe he didn't understand life. Maybe he did. Maybe that can't be absolutely determined.
There was a limit to how much he could sleep. One day he would feel so rested, he would not be able to stand still. Maybe on that day greater things would come to pass.
