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Keats wrote that “a World of Pains and troubles” is necessary “to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul.”
Hey, Sir Melancholy
“So, care for a drink?”
Silence.
“Oops--Enigmatic doesn’t drink, right?”
Melancholy’s target for the night leans back,
sips his nightly bout with bourbon,
realizing such is the comfort of certain memories
trying to take control,
and sighs.
His mind wanders.
Why must the downhearted find not solace,
but mere sympathy with Sir Melancholy?
Perhaps the nature of a distressed mind
often finds identification and attachment
to sorrow’s impact only with imagination.
“Water?”
“Seltzer?”
Silence.
“A bar’s surrounding makes it difficult, you know?
So, what do you want from me?”
A nod.
A smile.
“Okay. I get it. Your MO is unnerving… even frightening. Good act, but
I’m on the precipice of an abyss, understood? I don’t feel myself as part of the whole, but a stray fragment, just teetering. Yeah, I realize that something is missing with this ragged mind. So what are you going to do about it?
Silence.
“Some friend you are.”
He gestures to the bartender… another one.
“You encourage a striving to be whole, to find the ellusive piece of the puzzle.
Yet… you but delve into the riddles of being, having little idea how difficult
attuning my mind to the shifting and rumbles within me are, and yet…
You visit every night… suggesting that it’s the pursuit that affords uplifting powers. Didn’t any of your mentors teach you melancholy with me isn’t a single emotion like love and anger, but a state of various shades and layers, the unresolved longing that spin my imagination, returning me to whatever desolate flotsam of the past I’ve waded through in my life,
insisting I make a pause to notice things I might not have otherwise given any attention to.
So… I have a heightened sense of self-awareness. Is it not but a state in between a sundown fading toward darkness, where conflicted forces reside? Life versus death. Love versus loss. Such are the comments one should have uttered to their mother and father… the moments I should have exercised when I was younger. I know. I know. You hadn’t happened for me yet.
So… Mr. Melancholy, at this late age you beckon me to stride into your swirl pool of dis-ease and find a way akin to grace? But honestly… we both know you are the piquant reality of an existential crisis.
Even you, Mr. Melancholy, have witnessed many wasted years of me, others, our lives, our loves,
our cares, our griefs, our triumphs all but drifting away among the flotsam of regrets. And yet…
So, Mr. Melancholy, tell me… does any of my malady matter?
Silence.
C’mon. For Christ’s sake. Have one drink with me.”
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Love ya!
Jane
So many times, because I didn't drink beer, I heard that last line slightly modified to use the word "beer" for the word, drink.
Ron