Ruminations of a Working Man, Pt. X: Member of Everything

Up there, I was a member of everything, and it was everything.

I cried out words of desire and awe and regret and everything. I sang praises to the God I believe in, though I don’t expect you to believe in Him because of my few, simple words. But I believe He put on a show for me up there. The wind whipped my hair back and forth, and it reminded me how distempered I am, and how distempered I’d be when I returned. And now I have returned, and my distempered spirit whips the leaves of paper off my desk and scatters them in my confined space that I – admittedly, of my own accord – returned to. My once blissfully vacated chair groans in protest under the weight of my newfound memories and slowing pulse. I make haphazard jokes about taking the damned copier and pushing it out the fifth-story window at work. The joke is in the fact that I’d never do it.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly the problem.

Last night, I hung up the coat that shielded me high on the Cliffs of Moher in the closet that I seldom open, the hinges groaning in protest. The salt from the ocean spray, still clinging to the thick sleeves, left my fingers sticky and longing to return. A gentle yet abrasive reminder that, for once, I did it. I was a member of everything, and my eyes saw the vibrant colors of everything. My ears were buffeted with the pulse of everything, and its pulse became my pulse.

And now it slows, and the joke remains: My screensaver at work is a still shot of the Cliffs, the waves suspended where they were for only a moment, the pulse held in lethargic suspension. For this moment, I too remain still.

Here in this place, I am but a still shot of everything that I am.

But I am a member of everything.

Sleeve