The Lovesick King


Dear Eugene,

I was walking into a mall with my wife and in-laws.

Someone's playing rough, I thought, from what I heard.

Two young East Indian men were wrestling another young man, forcing him against the large surface of a supporting structure.  It looked violent but it really sounded like frolicking.

I thought I heard giggling until I saw the man against the wall had only one skate-shoe on, his other shoe not too far from where he tried to stay standing, three feet away from a skateboard obviously his, two twisted "Mr. Big" candy bars foregrounded the commotion, off-creen from the left entered a voice ill-at-ease to put ease in all bystanders: I got it, I got it....

An older man, apparently a retail store manager, finally got it altogether.

With a pair of handcuffs.

Where do you get a pair of handcuffs, just like that?  I muttered to who knows whom.  Was it on him all the time?  In a drawer where he'll open to pull it out at a rude moment's notice?  Is the downfall of young man so prevalent that judgement is always at the door, ready to pounce to "get things together"?

 Well, you steal a...I heard an onlooking judge pronouncing beside me, an old man's voice...a...what's it? a candy bar--for heaven's sake--well, you get arrested, and that's that...

 I wondered if this judge has a son.  Or a grandson, for his age.  I wondered if his grandson likes skateboarding, that sometimes he would lose a shoe when trying to board his skate in an agitated state of mind and being, running away from a decision he had made and instantly regretted but was now too late to stop following it through, praying in his heart of heart for one final deliverance, vowing to never agitate another soul in his life, not to even kill a fly or curse at a dog, if only the deliverance would come as he vaguely recalled promised somewhere sometime ago, by the caressing touch of a young mother, the stern but reassuring words of a young father, the irksome presence of a school teacher who gave him her heart which he carelessly dropped and didn't regret and attempt another causal look at the poor thing on the ground until years later...

For myself, I didn't have to wonder any of these.

I have a son who at the moment when this tragedy was playing out at the entrance of this mall has already entered the entrance of another mall not too many miles away shopping for a skateboard likely wearing a pair of Snoopy-themed Vans I got him two weeks ago and trashed a week after.  One thing more I didn't have to wonder is that he likes candy bar and wouldn't mind having one when he feels like having one.

The scene ended before it gained any significant dramatic traction.  A young man fell, and that's that.  I and other judges walked away from the little square stage, back to other affairs in need of our frequent and diligent judging.

Angels in heaven were weeping, for their King was heartbroken, too lovesick to be consoled, and now refusing to eat, to dance, to delight in anything until he has his lost son back.

Weeping, Alex

Comments

  1. KartiniMay 20, 2018 at 12:12 AM

    Dear Eugene,

    “Angels in heaven were weeping, for their King was heartbroken…”

    Heartbroken was the woman whom I had met at the spa. It was my day off from work & I was scheduled to be loved at the most superficial level by botanical facial peel & mask. My esthetician, who exuded charm & experience, wrapped me tenderly on the massage table under the enchantment of low lights & soothing sonatas. Her fingers danced on my face every so delicately, each glide conveying poetry to every epidermal cell. I sank deeper into the cotton sheets, raptured by the spell of love.

    As she continued to caress my face with the sweetness of aloe vera cream, our conversations over the course of 45 min drifted from weather to yoga before descending upon the subject of men. Her husband had left her several years ago, she lamented. Now in her mid-forties, she had transitioned more recently to a promising emotional relationship, which unfortunately ceased to thrive over the past several months much to her bewilderment. But the search for love would surely persist over peaks & chasms until the perfect union be found.

    For a suspended breath in time, I briefly saw my past narrative enmeshed in hers. There is nothing more grievous than rejection, the hollow reality of being abandoned at the other side of closed doors. Have we been escaping all our lives from the unspeakable prospect of rejection? Could it possible to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the greatest love known to humankind, the type of love which supersedes all grand imageries of passion & eroticism rampant in mythologies?

    The greatest love story of the Lovesick King must be shared. I found the King earlier in my life & His acceptance of me has banished the hollowness within me. Now at this momentous time, it is up to me to relay this love story to her & the heartbroken so that we may be restored in perfect reunion with the King.

    Weeping no more, K


    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One World, This

Image
Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua
Keep reading

He Walks Our Line

Image
Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of
Keep reading

A Word for the Caveman

Image
Dear Eugene, We could imagine when a caveman was chased by a T-Rex, the nature man would naturally cry for help. His shriek would have been a plead no less earnest than ours when we lost control of our vehicle to an evil sheet of ice.  If after years of high education we could in our final moment at least wrap our spinning head around the physics of skating in a ball of metal into our death, the caveman wouldn't have the luxury of comparable enlightenment to come to terms with his demise under the chicken-feet of a leviathan. Who was the caveman crying to?  In whose name was his prayer going to be answered, if at all?  And if he could not even utter an intelligible syllable comprehensible to himself, who was going to speak on his behalf when he was most in need to be spoken for? Now these are the questions I would ask a Christian if I am not one. Not too long ago a pastor tried to warn me about N. T. Wright by saying he's cool with the dude and all, but make sure I
Keep reading