The Struggle of Life

Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in a hour, twenty-four hours in a day, three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, eighty-five years in this old body of mine. All those moments and years have slipped through my hands, before my eyes and into history. Never again to be seen except through my mind’s eye as memories.

Some of these moments were spent well. Those warm summer mornings as a child in my own new world. Quick raps on the front door would signal the new adventures that awaited me that day and with a flash out of bed and a leap down the stairs, I was ready to answer the call. With a best friend on either side, we set out into a world that was ripe for our conquering. As we set out the waking sun would say “hi” with yawn. We would shout “hello” right back with all the joy and happiness that filled our young hearts.

Most days we would head to the fort we had constructed in the forest on the outskirts of town. Our fort had a certain magical feel to it. It was as big as a house and twice as sturdy, at least that is how I remember it. That fort was like a second home to us. We would spend whole days within it’s driftwood walls and mud and field grass ceiling.

We would stage fights and acted like barbarians invading a castle. Using stick swords and our homemade bows that would have been impossible to fire even if we had had arrows, two of us would attack the remaining one inside the fort. We would have to draw straws to see who got to defend the fort because, of course, they would always emerge victorious.

Thousands of games of Go-Fish were also played there. We didn’t have any money so we couldn’t buy a good deck of cards. We had to use an old dirty deck with a napkin as the jack of diamonds that my grandfather had thrown away or at least had tried to but we didn’t care. The jokes and stories we shared were more important than the game anyway. Dirty jokes that only old men were suppose to know and which our mothers would have washed our mouths out with soap if they had heard us tell them. Stories about the latest achievements of torture we had done to torture those icky girls in out on going playground war. Stories about the home run one of us hit in a neighborhood baseball game even if we all had seen it and heard the story hundreds of times already, each time the distance growing longer and height growing higher. We had stories for every occasion and when we didn’t our young active imaginations would provide them for us. Those days never did seem to last long enough.

Some of them were spent poorly. Those homeless winter nights of sleeping in whatever alley had the best trash in the dumpster or cardboard box to sleep in that night. My heart contained no feelings those nights or at least none that were perceivable anyway. How could it? It had been removed from its pedestal of importance. The cascading winds of winter’s breath had knocked it off and turned it cold; incapable of providing any warmth or any comforting thoughts that I so desperately needed. As if thoughts would have done any good for me anyway. My hollow stomach’s angry rumble echoing in my skull saw to that. The haunting screams and shouts of a mad man that I heard in that rumble drowned out any other thoughts that dared creep their way to the foreground of my consciousness.

My mind was a battlefield those nights. My sanity was the prize to be won or destroyed by the victor. The outcome was all too evident. My chances were grim at best. The hunger and cold were horrible demons. They ravaged the landscape of my mind in their genocidal war against my spirit and hope. They fought my spirit and hope at every turn and crushed them ruthlessly. My mind wasn’t a battlefield; it was a graveyard. It was a graveyard in a state of constant expansion, increasing to a size beyond any human’s wildest dream, or nightmares. My nightmares still provide a constant reminder of those nights.

Do you see that clock on the wall? Tick tock, tick tock; do you hear it? Even as I speak now seconds are passing by us. Flashing by before we even get a chance to understand how important they are or how important they could become. Our bodies have a similar clock inside each of us. This bodily clock also records the passage of those seconds. One important difference exists between this wall clock and our body clock however. The clock on the wall will continue showing the passage of those seconds for all eternity but our bodies will not. For our clock, time is a finite thing.

The seconds in our body are in a personal race along a path. The seconds have been running this race inside us since the moment we were born into this world. Our bodies watch the progress of this race very closely because once these seconds finish our race, we move on to a place where time has no meaning. My race is near completion. The seconds are on the final section of the path and have the finish line in sight. My seconds have seen many things during their race along my path. They have witnessed both the well spent and poorly spent moments of my life. My only regret is that the latter was the majority of what was seen along my path. It is too late for me to change that. I can’t go back and change what I’ve done. I wish I could. I wish with every fiber of my being that I could. Ultimately, however, I cannot. There is no reverse in this race. No restarts; no do-over given, no matter how much I want there to be. They just don’t exist. I simply have to accept it.

But you are different. Your race has just begun. The outcome is still in your control. I beg of you, don’t allow your race to follow the same path as mine, to the same miserable finish. Don’t just go with the flow and automatically accept things as the way they are suppose to be. The path of the race is not laid out for you. There is no fate making the path for you, leading you to some ultimate destiny at the finish line. You must determine the path of your race and the location of the finish line. I hope you choose to fill your path with well-spent moments. You don’t have to end up all alone like me. Living on the hated money of oblivious strangers. Trapped within these crumbling walls called an apartment unfit for the rats that share provide my only companionship. Maybe only seemingly trapped. Where would I go anyway?

Just look at me. You don’t want to be me. I don’t even want to be me. I know you can be better than me. I know that more than anyone else. So don’t make the same mistakes I did. Please, don’t repeat them.