Something I did on the morning of the last day of submission for our thesis. I continued it last night. Enjoy the story. Tear Jerker. sob sob.
Pandora's Box
Ola. It's December 1, 2004, and I am in a combination of feelings right now, mostly negative. My groupmate just mentioned that he's gonna sleep like anything later tonight, and I think I'll do the same thing. I have been awake for near 24 hours now, and it seems like I can handle this intentional insomnia. No wait, I can't. Or can I? I guess Tyler Durden said it the best way:
'With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.'
And then somewhere else he mentions:
'With insomnia, you're never really awake, and you're never really asleep.'
Enough with the movie quotes. Have I mentioned that I am stressed out, depressed, pissed, angry, frustrated, just in the lowest I can be? No? Never? Well, I guess I'm too exhausted to scream out how pissed I am now, not as much as I was a few nights ago.
Here's a little story, twisted by the more lenient recesses of my imagination, to the more sympathetic to the pathetic. Picture this, if you will:
The stinkiest guy in the world was walking down the street one afternoon, minding his own humiliating and moreover stinky business, when suddenly he stops, totally flabbergasted at the sight of the most beautiful red rose he ever saw in his whole stinky life. He takes this flower, puts it in a new pot, goes back to his stinky little home and
(January 10, 2005) ...places it where he could see it when he wanted to, which was very often.
This flower dramatically became the world to him, and he believed that this flower was the sign of the start of a new and fruitful life. For, he thought, why else would God have him stumble upon it in the first place? With that premise in mind, the stinkiest man in the world decided to take some steps so that his stinky life would be less repulsive to match the beauty of the red rose. He swept up his stinky house, he threw out all the dirty clothing, dirty books, and dirty beer bottles out to the local incinerator. He even cleaned the yard and kept a spot near the door extra clean, prepared to be the soil for the red rose that had inspired this stinky man to clean up.
But, clean surroundings notwithstanding, he himself was still pretty stinky. That's right, he had only one thing left to do: He had to take a bath. So he filled his tub up with water, shed his clothes, and hopped in. You can literally see the dirt come out of the man, collecting on the surface of the water, like grease in a cooling bowl of dinuguan. So he kept replacing the tub's water, until finally, he and the water were of one adjective - clean. For a while, he laid his head back and sighed, exclaiming in whispers, "I've gotten rid of the dirt that I was so accustomed to, for a red rose, a God-given inspiration"...
After the (long) bath, the ex-stinkiest guy in the world took the rose and just looked at it. Suddenly, a voice came into his head, sounding like something he did not have for quite a while since: conscience, conscience of the clean.
"Smell it", the voice said.
So he did.
"It smells like a rose," he said.
"Smell it again", the voice said, now in a bolder voice.
"It still smells like a rose."
"Smell it. One last time."
So he took one more whiff at the flower, and to his surprise, it was a smell so repulsive, so disgusting, that it was stinkier than he ever was before. But, we must leave it to him to describe it in the best detail for us; he said, in a wisdom, no, a clarity, no, imagination not expected of him, "It smells like scores and scores of innocent people that have been dead and rotten for a year now, former inhabitants of a virgin paradise, invaded and mercilessly taken advantage of by an army they thought to be an ally.."
AUTHOR'S NOTE: NOTICE THE BOLD WORDS IN WHAT HE SAID. GO FIGURE.
....A feeling of disbelief came, and he kept taking sniffs at the rose in pathetic desperation and, more to the point, denial.. But all he smelled was the stench that was the sum of all his fears.
The river of tears that followed was not near the puddle expected. The shouts of abject frustration, anger, and helplessness were not near the sobs expected. And after the storm of emotions have passed, the man, in aftershock shivers of an uncertain future, a sense of morality left fragile and otherwise beaten to submission to heartache, and a lit cigarette, whispered, "All this time, I thought I was going to change for the better for something that I fell in love with which was nowhere near the filthy wretch I was. I was wrong. What a fool I was to have never seen it coming.."
-THE END-
Now, in my current state of mind, I see no real protagonist here, for the rose and the man were both wrong. One fatal fact known at the worst time was enough to ruin everything, leaving the man in an absolute state of confusion and grief. Let it be known that a truth withdrawn inflicts the same, if not more, pain of a lie.
A conundrum, possibly with an apparently obvious answer: How was the rose 'God-given'?