White Light

I guess what I'm really looking for is a sense of beauty in the world. I want something to keep my negativity at bay and remind me of all the finer things in life. It comes to me in the form of a passionate lover or as a girl whose inner beauty matches her perfect physical shape.

Why must my life drag me through so much negativity just for a few fleeting glimpses of true beauty? I've tried desperately to hold on to them, but everything in this world shifts and changes. The ocean reaches its waving arms up to embrace the moon's pull. The mountains are lifted up beyond the cloudy sky by the ground at their feet. The desert sands ebb and flow in a wind that buries shinning jewels and quiet oases that once revived dehydrated nomads from almost certain death. All these changes, whether rapid or gradual can be witnessed, but never fully grasped by the human mind alone.

So next, I attempted to save and catalogue every aspect of this pure light that I could capture; errant sketches of the female form, sexy photographs of past lovers, inspired stories from previous exploits, all in a desperate attempt to remind myself of enough good things in the world to balance out all of my frustrated failures and let downs. I want to have the bright radiance of the universe at my fingertips, keep it on tap, but it just doesn't work that way. Once the sketch is complete the moment has passed. Pictures fade. Memories are wildly imperfect and start to slip away. Time affects people just as lunar gravity pulls on the earth. All you see is the reaction, the fallout from some great, invisible force.

And, the forces of the world are always at work. They are most noticeable when it comes to people. Daily, I deal with egotistical supervisors imposing their impromptu rules to make themselves feel more powerful. Complacent lawmen regulate laws based not on right or wrong, but on which ones help them complete that month's bingo-card-style ticket quota. Why should he care if he just ruined the next year of your life? Shift bid is coming up next month and he wants weekends off. The current system is designed to keep people where they are. The rich don't want to share their money with anyone and the poor are too busy surviving day-to-day to do anything about it.

So here I am, going through my own biweekly poverty cycle. On work-days I'm struggling to eat on a schedule and trying to arrange for small computer fix-it jobs for the weekends to supplement my income, all the while waiting for next payday. My time off consists of sleepless nights researching, fixing computers, or just plain fits of penniless depression with a sinking feeling that I should be doing something to make more money. Paychecks simply disintegrate as I slip them into metal drop boxes for the tellers at the bank. Bills, food, and computer replacement parts all perpetuate the cycle by being all-too-expensive necessities.

All in all, it's turning me into some kind of Zen master. I'm standing outside of myself just watching these things happen. Why am I even here? What am I actually struggling so hard for? I don't want to be homeless, but there's got to be something I'm missing. I don't necessarily want to be rich. That's never been a main goal in my life. I just don't want to worry about getting evicted or whether I have enough money to eat something for breakfast tomorrow, and most of all, I want to be happy. That's really what's missing. Sometimes people skip meals or get behind on bills, but the thing that will totally wreck them every time is if what truly makes them happy is taken from them. And, in my case, I just can't hold on to it.