a young man and a young woman

Most begin with a brief exposition of their current context; the relevant and irrelevant details of their surroundings (symbolic, setting, mood, and so on), and both temporal and spatial. What function this excercise serves, whether to aid in the task of remembering what to write, or to simply impose an image upon the envelope whose contents the following words will find themselves within, to prepare the recipient in some way for the message they are about to recieve; much like a letterhead, or an establishing long shot in a film..we see the city, then the building, then the room, cut to a medium close up, a man sitting at a table. cut to a close up of a tired looking face, and then, he speaks......I embrace this same desire to elaborate upon unecessary details, the meaning of which will remain illusive and unintelligible to me, for I am living them, they are open for interpretation... In a play.....
A young man sits at a table tucked away in some library stacks side stage, there are three empty tables surrounding his table, each with four empty chairs of there own, his of course only having three left. There is a brown man with white hair and a tiny kind looking face sleeping at a comfortable looking chair at the opposite side of the stage, with his back to the audience. The young man takes a few assessing glances at him to observe his shut eyes and briefly reason that the mean had probably been waiting for the library to open in order to get some sleep in a warm comfortable place; there are others lining the other floors of the library doing the same thing, some even taking there shoes off to show the world how dirty their socks are. There are pretty old buildings seen through a large window at the back of the stage, which functions to shine light in upon the young man's back from behind and cast the slightest of shadows towards the front of the stage; the building look to be downtown apartments, old frameworks filled with bricks; tiny balconies with plants on there last legs of life as the weather becomes less accomodating. On this day, the sky is grey and perpetually pouring rain down; sometimes softly, sometimes hard. The young man seems to enjoy this miserable weather-he conveys this subtly by sneaking glances down toward the ground outside to inwardly record observations of the speckles upon the puddles to insure the rain has not ceased, or to document the force with which it is presently falling. He writes in a navy blue hard covered notebook and the audience is left with nothing more than the sight of him scribbling and sipping on a large paper cup filled with coffee. These past few weeks of my experience, like blank polaroids, whose exposure to light has failed to impose an image of anything with the lack of any image striking enough to leave even a vestige......(except for that one incident) The mundane succesion of days whose uniformity has come accompanied with an intuitively predictable flux of colours which paint the sky and shade the day to day occurences; and here I am writing to you. As aware of the nothingness within me and around me as ever; my desire to create is an expression of my revolt against this nothingness. By pouring words upon this page, I admit a preference for imaginary images to the bleak perceivable appearance of things when existing in this town. These words will provide a new method of interpretation for my existence; a new mood for the movie
As much as it seems I hate this passing of days, I have discovered how frightening it is to have the uniform succession of experience disrupted by something unsuspected...though the discontinuity of this chain is not what instills such fear; it was the incident itself and the following implications which I have been left to dwell upon. I surely will remember this event forever-there is no question. As a result, I no longer walk with the same sense of security towards the consitency which I have taken for granted; so unappreciative to the extent of it actually thoroughly irritating me. I find this so strange, that after a tragedy or a shocking incident, people can easily re-plug themselves back into society to be consumed with arbitray concerns and petty domestic disputes. It isn't so much a choice perhaps, as a result of participating in the day to day humdrum, 'life goes on'.....I know of a man on his deathbed, tumours enclosing upon his heart who 'miraculously' recovered and has returned to good health-grown hair on top of his head again; seemingly the moment he returned to living him and his girlfriend got on with thier childish disagreements-perhaps their games never ceased, even during the worst spells of bad health.....you'd think they'd just be appreciative that one another was alive after him having stood on the edge of the cliff, staring into the fait of oblivion...the irony of life; I expressed this sentiment to the person who told me of them playing jealous games with one another....and later that night I would have my own chance to learn such a lesson.
For, I have now watched a chord come unplugged from a body that was standing perfectly well, right next to me, while both of us were engaged in taking this uniformity, and predictability of experience for granted, for not even our most immediate of foresights would come true. Projections for what was about to ensue could not have been more in error. Standing with assurance of what the two of us were about to enjoy together, her laughter and approvement of my demeanor expressed with every half drunken assesment of my appearance, and her re-assuring words that I had successfully won the hearts of her somewhat simple neighbours with my humour. There we stood, her occasionally clasping my arm, in comfortable glee and joyous anticipation for the music we were about to collectively enjoy, like two unsuspecting flies on a window pane enjoying the warmth of the sun, when one gets swatted by a force unknown to them, whose power comes so swiftly and decisively that it leaves nothing behind but a dirty looking smear on the glass where a life lived in the seconds prior; a life that felt things, flew, and landed with confidence and assurance upon the mere existence of their conciousness of the next few moments-only to have them smacked and sent into oblivion without warning. This is much how the scene transpired for us two flies; us two birds on a branch, feeling love in our ruminating of the present tense, comfortable in the sound of one another's chirps, only to have the blast of a shotgun pierce through the trees, to send one of us birds falling to the leaves beneath instantaneously. In a flash one disappears from the surface. This was her and me. In a moment, her eyes rolling back to her brain and dropping to the ground with only the faintest of warning sounds in the form of the words, 'I think I need some fresh air."
Panic sets in upon watching what was so undeniably alive in one moment, fall to a lifeless blank nothingness in the latter half of the same moment. Gone, I hold the back of her head and her waist up from laying completely on the ground, and reach for whatever hands might be clinging to life within her by calling her name; like reaching down into darkness blindly with hopes of connecting with another set of fingers in order to pull an entire body back into light, to re-awaken her consciouness back into life. Tears upon having the chain of existence broken, but why? ...I assert it was the deepest feelings of sympathy for her unsuspecting innocence which led her right up until that moment without a glimpse of a clue of what was about to happen to her. Dropping to the ground was her body, as her mind surely found itself lost in some imperceicevable darkness; with the sound of my voice calling her name, creeping in through whatever cracks of sound could climb in through. Please allow these words to be heard and to bring her back to the surface. Please God.
As if watching a movie begin to unfold right before my eyes; this is how the sight of the frames that passed in the following moments intuitively struck the pre-reflective consciousness. And I immediately become the sincerest of actors, whose tears need neither reflection nor interpretation to continue to pour freely from my eyes. There she lies, she comes back to the surface momentarilly and I pick her up and begin to walk her out, still so far to go....she collapses again....what the hell is happening?... now up against the wall and cradled in my arms amidst a scene that suddenly reeks of chaos needing organization in order to render it all intelligible, in order to clear a path for her wheelchair to pass through the masses. She is green and grey in the face with an oxygen tube up her nose, and her eyes reflect only a blankness that seems to be experiencing the same dream as I am but in a much more surreal and tranquil way than I; she is weak and unable to move at all by her own volition, while everyone else in the scene with me suddenly seems a mere obstruction in our path; all the onlookers unaffected by everything which has turned my entire being on its head; we are the only two in this entire stadium of people whose sleepy existence has become disturbed by this nightmare.
Surely, the most afraid I have been in my entire life, and the funny thing is, I was not afraid for my own well being at all; for someone else's. I find this funny for the fact that I am aware of how concerned with myself I constantly am...but watching this happen to her, someone more innocent and less reflective than I, someone always so simplistically appreciative of the subtleties which can at times mean very little to a temporally contingent mind like me; I do not say she is stupid, i merely mean that she is clearly more in contact with more sincere emotions than I...for, to me, this night marked merely the opening for me, in a string of adventures to come, I already had the mood and aftertaste of the evening premeditated in my mind. I would act in this way so to insure that everything would go smoothly, that she would be happy, and we would both walk away with this pleasant memory of one another. I merely prepare myself in such a way to ease my nerves.....But all of that speculation was rendered impossible by a swatting of some invisible newspaper; a pellet from a cowardly hunter's gun, who hides in the shrubs so well that he becomes invisible to all around; a dead-eye with a rifle shooting straight for the weak little hearts of pretty, happily chirping, unsuspecting birds.
Tubes up her nose and a pulse reading which tells of weakness in the heart and momentary lapses without beats strong enough to make an impression upon the surrounding veins; cut to outside where she is too weak to move and strapped into a stretcher with tears coming down her cheeks at the thought of my not being able to accompany her to the hospital, and in my thoughts, there is the tugging inclination that this is all too strange to even actually be occurring, though I continuously repeat the word to myself, 'Please, Please...." .....for in a moment without warning, she dropped like a sack of dirt, from off the branch we both were sitting upon with such comfort and ease, such confidence that the next moment in time would bring us the same safety and earth to stand our legs upon. Please....
The scariest experience of my life to date; one which undermines all justifications for feelings of, 'woe is me'. For, nothing compares in strength to the deepest of sympathies which ran through me in the hours of this incident- set into motion by some invisible force; sympathy is an inadequate word to encompass the multiplicity of feelings compounded within my body at that moment-a synthesis of some indescribable shock and sadness all at once. Instincts overtaking a body whose mind is profoundly concerned with ensuring the survival of one so dear to them.
'So dear to them'? Apparently, for in those moments when the reel playing the most comfortable of movies breaks, and the house lights come on full to illuminate the snakes composing the floor beneath your feet... how awakened, how much care, how little one understands what the hell is going on.... how empty was my daydream in the sleepy state leading in to this day; of the humdrum of the passing of my time; the selfishness to my leisurely living which allowed me to take for granted the very root of all things known to me; the strange, illusive quality attached to things still breathing and being; that quality of being 'alive'. The realization that her chord can come unplugged at any moment without warning makes me wish to wrap my arms around her and never release my grip.
This is my illusive way of articulating a sight without presenting the facts objectively as if from the prospective of a reporter. Reading the events of this as seen or collected by the hands of a heartless reporter would render the scene all that much more shocking and surreal to me. Young man and young woman attend concert. He said the girl expressed a desire for fresh air before falling to the floor in what looked to witnesses to be a seizure, but what was later diagnosed by doctors as an irregularity of heart activity. Her head may or may not have hit the ground according to the young man who seemed to still be in shock at the scene and for some hours afterward while standing beside her motionless body as it was carted from floor, to floor after having collapsed again, to a small room filled with St.John's workers whose comments regarding the scene were too retarded for this reporter to consider relevant or useful towards any sort of articulation of what occured, to a stretcher, to an emergency room, to a hallway at the hospital.
"I had plans of leaving the city in a few days; it would perhaps be the one of the last times we went out together...something tells me plans have changed. I stayed the next three days at her side, constantly refreshing my memory of the feeling running through my being, that she might no longer be with me in a second. That she might die right before my eyes and I would be helpless, right here and right now on this floor around all these unconcerned gawkers taking in the show, so unsuspectingly and innocently in a moment of happiness and appreciation for ME... the life from her body stolen with a swift sleight of hand! Appreciating me of all people, one who so easily from to time could take her looks of approval for granted without so much as allowing them to register in any sort of positive way. Prayers said and apologies to God all over again-there certainly strikes a chord of irony within the timing of this whole spectacle, why were you placed at her side at that moment after all of this? And, what would have happened had you not have been there? Are you not meant to ask these questions now; to dwell in guilt upon the previous promises you made to Him if she would only just love you? Is there not something surreal about all of this? You certainly think so now don't you.....Consider that there might be a reason for your presence in this particular envelope in space IN time, in this rather fragile game, placed at her side by your own prayers, do you not now have to face the responsibilities associated with having a wish fulfilled?