They sat at the dinner table. She brought her hands together saying, “Thank you.”

“Who are you thanking?” her older sister asked.

“No one. I’m just thankful.”

“Are you thanking God?” her father asked.

“No. I don’t know whom I’m thanking, and it doesn’t seem to matter. I’m just thankful, I’m thankful there is food when so many children are starving. I’m thankful I have a home, and I’m thankful I don’t have to sleep out in the cold at night. I’m just thankful.”

The rest of the family sat listening, chewing their food with their heads low to their plates, but with eyes up, unable to resist being curious about what she was saying.”

“Well you have to be thanking someone. It doesn’t make sense otherwise,” her sister retorted.

“Yes, it makes perfect sense!” I realize that for some unknown reason I have things that others don’t and I’m happy and grateful for it.”

“But that’s a prayer you said!”

“No it’s not! And even if it is, it’s still true!”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“And you’re stupid!”

–

He lied on the bed, at peace with doing nothing. During such moments it was important for him to find comfort in doing nothing, in doing nothing but being. For here he felt he had hit on one of the secrets of life: to be comfortable with doing nothing. This was not being lazy, far from it. Indeed, he had learned from watching people from the “baby boomer generation,” how hard it was to do nothing, and had come to feel that it was those people working constantly, unable to ever take a rest, and take time to enjoy being alive, unable to enjoy life itself; those people who thought to be hard working meant being virtuous that were truly lazy. To him these were the laziest of people for they were too lazy to stop and take in the pure essence of life; life with it’s good and bad, with its perplexity, and the existential anxiety that came with wondering about it all. Such people had busied themselves with the belief that existing meant doing and doing meant being. But all he ever learned from watching such people, with their incessant activity, was that their drive to stay busy was at heart nothing more than a determination to avoid some inevitable reality about life, and that they were merely trying to escape some unavoidable day when an individual is no longer physically fit enough to occupy his or her thoughts through labor; with the inevitable reality of being feeble, bed ridden, and stuck relatively handicapped with a whole world of doubt concerning the point of life, four cornering the space and time left to existence.

–

He thought about the optimism he had at that time concerning new beginnings. He wondered if he was wrong for having it then; he wondered if it was wrong to want it now; that he desired either the past or optimism itself, he did not know.

He felt buried by the present moment, and was uncertain what it meant. It involved feeling and being comfortable with the past, though it made him want to disappear from the present; it made him accepting of and happy that in the present he was able to be so at home, at piece with his memories and comfortable with the person he had come to be. He thought about this contradiction: loving one’s past from the present moment, loving the present because of it, but desiring to escape to the past nonetheless.

–

Doesn’t it bother you that you have to have sound all the time, that you can’t sleep without music? Shouldn’t it alarm you, or anyone, that you are unable to tolerate silence? What will happen when you’re older, or on your deathbed? Won’t silence catch up with you, chasing the very bones in your body as they begin to age and weaken? You’ll fight the silence with your body through tensions that make your muscles strain and your bones crack. You’ll claim to be upset over becoming old, but secretly you’ll come to love your decaying body because of the sounds emanating from them as they age, and you’ll pass away telling your self there was no other way. And you’ll die screaming in your head through a voice that no one will hear.

–

The endless distractions; a glass of tea here, a cigarette there; a nap, a walk, an endless stretch of daydreams; songs, food, drinks, TV shows, movies, idle talk, video games, gossip. The restlessness that gives way to movement, the movement that gives way to restlessness, and somewhere, floating between, a stillness that seems ephemeral, but only because one tries to hold on to it.

–

He lied in bed, on his side, with his arm by his face stretched over his head. From this angle he could see the pulse in the vein of his arm. He watched and began staring at it drearily. Soon he was thinking of her, focusing on the beat, the pulsation, Before long, the beat became her breathing; he watched and could feel her breath between kisses; he stared, and his pulse became the thrusts of his pelvis while making love; then the beat became the blink of her large beautiful eyes, opening and closing with the rhythm of her heart; staring back at him as if she was there. He watched his pulse and with every beat a memory of her would flash in his mind until it seemed she was his very blood, coursing through his body in torrents of red and blue.