Strangers in the Cave

The only thing that keeps people from thinking I am insane is my inaction. I emerge into the high school cafeteria and for a moment I want to yell, "This is the only today you will ever get!" I can see myself doing it for a moment, can feel the rush through my nervous system and purse my lips closed to stop any sound. It scares me how close it feels. My superego holds me back; I like having fairly regular work and my outburst would inexorably end it here.<!-- --> Photo Caption With Right Vertical Spacer -->

The students wouldn't hear me anyway. Opal clouds float in the turquoise sky and all they will ever see is the next class or the slowly expanding sweater of a classmate. They don't know how perfect this day is and I am at least deviant for caring so much. They would just mock and thus not a one would care.

So many, not just high school students, reside in a cloud of ironic detachment. I should know; I feel like I am just stepping out of it. It is easy and comfortable, but it is hiding, not living.

It is fashionable to make a sarcastic remark and let everything splash off, actually absorbing stimuli and participating in your life somehow passé. I know so many people who glide through their lives tearing down everyone and everything, as though caring for one second would reveal that no amount of attempted destruction builds.

But I am not so bold as to think I have some insight worth sharing loud enough to ring of the cement brick walls. If I were them, I would just have made a sarcastic remark to my friends so I wouldn't be a stranger in the cave.

Like the human capacity for languages, we have a capacity for rationalization. Whenever anything trips that circuit in our brains that something is incongruous, we just start filling in holes and hiding what cannot easily be shoved into sarcastic schema. I've lived so much of my life not seeing flowers, but boxes that say, "FLOWER" instead. I no longer feel I do that. In important ways that have nothing to do with actually being able to pay my bills, I feel a lot more adult now that I ever have before. Even if I do want to yell at teenagers for being teenagers.

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