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Category:
Inspirational
Publisher: G.P. Martin Publishing
ISBN-10: 1257058908
Type: Fiction
Pages: 241
Copyright: March 2011
ISBN-13: 9781257058907
After a young man breaks up with his girlfriend, he has an encounter with an old Chinese man who gives him a message about freeing himself from fate. He takes a job working with unemployed youth and has to learn how to relate to them at the same as dealing with a vexing co-worker and a management committee where the self-serving, the brutal, the scheming and the inept often hold sway.
This story takes place in a country town where a young man is starting a new life after a breakup with his girlfriend in the city. He has taken a job working with unemployed youth. The rough environment of the support service thrusts multiple challenges upon him – how to relate to the young people in their struggle to find a place in the community, his difficult female co-worker, and the dangerous foibles of some of the people on the management committee.
He experiences being sacked as the president seeks to demonstrate his power, but he is reinstated and gains a new co-worker, who brings new zest and direction to the project. They engage with the explosive anger of one of the young men, and the atmosphere of apathy and disillusionment. One youth is killed, and the two workers strive to show the community how to find hope.
Things come to a head at the annual bachelors and spinsters ball. Everyone turns up, some to play out ugly old myths again, and some to create new myths, even if by accident.
Excerpt
Chapter 1: The great sadness
When Janice told me she didn’t want to see me anymore, I left her apartment and started walking down the stairs. Then there didn’t seem to be any reason to keep walking, so I sat down, there on the stairs. The wall in front of me was glass, facing west, and it was afternoon. The sun streamed through and bathed me.
This wasn’t the beginning of the great sadness. It happened because I was in the midst of the great sadness, a little boat bobbing in the ocean, and no land in sight.
The Tao says “what you gain is more trouble than what you lose; sustain your connection to the source” . What I had to lose was the sadness, and that went way back. Of course, it seemed to be necessary to bang my head against a brick wall for a while. I loved Janice in that desperate way that completely disregards reality, like the fact that should have been obvious to me, that she was largely indifferent to me. She kind of just wanted a boyfriend, just to see what it was like to have a boyfriend for a while.
My desperate love spawned poems and private heart-rending. It was love like throwing yourself off a cliff, expecting gravity to suspend its implacability and transform the moment into bliss. In the end, there was nothing there but falling. In retrospect I could be grateful that she said it: “I don’t want to see you anymore”. If she’d thought differently, I could have been hanging at the end of her string forever in the hope of an impossibility.
Better to sit so empty on her stair that afternoon. And in any case, Janice wasn’t the source of the sadness. The sadness in which I was immersed was greater, deeper. The futile love was just a skirmish in its greater war, a playground where it could exercise its belligerent qualities. I knew it but I still ached for the dream of that love for Janice. I had thought that it would complete me, that there was an “us” that would make life wonderful.
These things were entangled with each other. I would have liked to have sorted it out before I had to go, but I figured I had to move off the stairs soon, and I was good at doing what I figured I had to do, so I got up and walked down the stairs. I got on my motorbike and rode away, wanting to shake off the weight by going somewhere.
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