Ramona Park

"It seems like we haven't talked in years, though it has only been a few months. The days seem like weeks, and the months years. You may wonder what exactly I'm doing, maybe just desperately clinging to the past. I've managed to get myself engaged. It was a hasty move, but we do have a year and a half to make up our minds. It's easy to mistake novelty for affection. Hopefully we'll both make the right decision when the time comes. Other than that my life hasn't changed, how about your's? As I get older I'm slowly becoming more aware that you can never be too assured you're on the right path, mistakes are always made, people always get hurt, and every choice can't stand scrutiny, and I know some whom can't stand the regret. There is no way we can ever go back to the way things were, we both tried very hard, but every time we got closer to one another the more we both slipped of each others' hands. I shouldn't have left when I did, but what else could I have done? It was clear the way I felt about you was far too strong, and I couldn't bear the fact that you didn't feel the same. It wasn't your fault, and I wish I don't still feel the same way, I wish it would pass, but it doesn't and it won't. I would tell you that I still dream about you, but I don't dream anymore. My nights are black. It hasn't rained up here for almost a month. Everything is dying. The grass is dry and coarse. The river is low. To be in such a city during a dry spell is death. My parents told me that it was going to rain soon back home. I hope you all get that rain. After I send this we'll probably lapse into another period of protracted silence. Maybe we won't ever speak again. We've had a contest for who will get the last word. There shan't be a victor this time. We each of us know our intentions, and I believe we knew them even way back when, but as you once told me people change, and I for a single instant never doubted that they do change, but what startled me was the velocity. I can't comprehend such a spontaneous metamorphosis without premeditation. That it was always there under the surface. I refuse. Hope all is well. I love you. Always."

He had written Sophie as much as he could after they had left each other. They tried and failed to make whatever it was they both latched onto work, they had tried again but only failed again and again. A few years had passed since their last encounter, and they both had moved on. She would soon after move in with another man. He would still write her. Even though he was now engaged, he was still writing her, he still felt compelled to write, he couldn't give her up. His life for the past year or so had been one to which all was waged on a reckless fleeting hope, of moving on, building something new, finding his own way, he had come to Michigan in order to forget. He would initially try to work himself into or out of complacency, he would throw himself into his work to be refused thrown back out, he must have learned Matter can never be created nor destroyed, he would learn you cannot make a something out of a nothing, and though this fact was always ingrained, he would go about his life totally unawares of such conservation until he was himself flat on his face desperately plying an indivisible alchemy. He had initially rented an apartment scantily furnished, only a mattress and other bare essential furnishing, and he looked forward to the days of spending hours upon hours engaged on some project, earning a reputation in the eyes of his peers, to forge a new identity. His days would drift back into reckless idleness, to come back into that self-same state which made him blind to everything but Sophie. An innocent obsession, but an obsession. He couldn't forget. Even though he was nearly 400 miles from where they had spent all the time they would ever spend with one another, distance had done nothing to diminish hope. Both those held hopes, one of creation and one of destruction, would collide to mutate one from another into self-effacing contradiction. Each step effacing the previous.

He had left in October. Soon the Winter had set in making it nearly impossible for him to travel, alone, with any confidence. He could only hunker down. Hunker down in a barrow of nothingness. The snow would pile outside his patio, making a primitive fortification. Thus entrenched, after his shift would be up on the auspicious hour of 4 p.m. he would make his way back home and have the coveted after-work cigarette. In an attempt to limit the habit off company premises and by default, giving himself something to look forward when he arrived home. When the snow would at long last finally melt, sometime in May, having had no ash tray, tossing them off in an at least 2 or 3 foot high mound of snow separating his patio from the grounds of the complex, after the snow had melted, there he would find almost 5 months worth of disregarded butts, scattered all over the property.

Following the customary pace, February into March, as a Chorus trumps off stage, leaving behind their hope in an Apotheosis of Dionysus for the year, their festival, their Dithyrambs silenced, the Satyr Play would follow, once again to regale in bestiality. With the commencement of Spring, so would go his hope, so fleet that prescient rejoinder of life, and effusive with suggestions to abandon those immemorial drawings-in, leave behind all what had sustained him a winter's long, but just to be active in present terms, to flounder and gimmick, are to abandon any such cordial suggestions. He would follow a course contretemps, to follow his heart, what was left of it. As Providence would declare, he would follow a course torn in absolute disaster and bitter disappointment, and to have goaded himself thus far, having at long last come to an astonished realization, whilst having driven himself nearly thence, why turn back? Let it swallow him whole, though it's acknowledged Jonah had the good fortune to be saved from the Leviathan, whose to say Daniel wouldn't be saved from the bowels of, say, a Lion? Or, to be fair, a Jackal? He, just carrion, and must have pondered dead flesh for months.

His job fit easily into the monotony of routine and repetition. It being decided after he finished school to take up a manufacturing administration position, and somehow thinking that the transition from college into the workforce, not just any workforce, but into an age-old industrial sized seething pot of Labor v. Administration, thinking that by superior reasoning faculties, he could necessitate himself above the contention. He left for Michigan, and it wouldn't be long, his first two or three weeks being relatively uneventful, but sooner or later he would be called out, interrogated for lack of a better word, asked what his role was, what was he doing here, why was he here, what he knew about the respective trade, how come he was, for all practical purposes, allowed to be meaningless, why he was useless, but this Laborer, whom had a son as well as a meaning and a function, his son being laid-off not working, why his son whom had a meaning and a function too, couldn't work? It wasn't the first time he would be speechless humiliated, and rightly couldn't answer the question with good conscience. There was no answer. Darwin himself would be mystified and speechless. Every time he would see this gentleman, the gentleman would sarcastically proclaim, "What'd Ya learn today?!?" He had found someone interested in his progress, even if that interest wasn't quite interest.

A bolder man would have left, but he couldn't do that, he had given up too much for this experiment not to work. He should have considered changing his career at that point, but he allowed himself to be troubled, and allowed himself to continue being useless. Maybe certain events had left too impenetrable a mark and couldn't be glossed over. He had witnessed the latest financial bubble, and had witnessed its bursting forth, and the misery and devastation it had wrought. Maybe he had had to have grown up at that point being at an age where he could understand and appreciate all its complexity, maybe they all must have, everyone, and looking too far was to cast too bright a canvass on a period not much more removed than the Roaring Twenties, but things had changed. The morass, not just in G.D.P. but creeping into things, onlookers, the chagrined Prosecutor, lamenting in oratorical flourish, " O Tempora O Mores ..., " the morass entailed not simply decay, but a sinking into it depth-less, to suffocate struggling unable to come up unable to rise to a certain level, thrashed into immobility, to have above and below the infinitesimal diminution of light, reduced to a particle, a quanta, watched from choking excrement the end of projecting future movements upon simple conditions of motion.

Those days had passed, now there was his Fiance, her position fixed in the relative order of things. He has spent most of his early adult life opposed to the idea of marriage. Not out of zealous bachelorhood, but the many tenets of the creed which had unsettled him. It is one thing to talk about the oblivion of individuality, as to practice, and maybe it was inevitable, he could concede that, maybe he was overindulgent to the Vanity of the Will, but it couldn't be argued too lightly so readily to disperse with forbearance. Then there was Sophie, though for the most part she was gone. He couldn't eradicate her from his life, that was impossible, and he would let himself feel the presence of her loss, and that was enough.

So season upon season would pass, season after season where he wold slowly inoculate himself to industrialization. From October where he had said good-bye to Sophie, had said good-bye to more, and at the moment none seemed to matter. He had said good-bye to usher more unseemly the aspects of life, having left what he had known to peer seductively behind the curtain. Despair didn't set in right away but was always present, direct from the outset. The subject of metal flow would ensconce itself into his mind, and would present itself as one of the prerequisites of further employment. It wasn't enough to view, and make an hypothesis from the vantage of a drawing board, engaged in the construction of models, even the scale factors were subject to tedious debate, and constant give and take, the giving and taking of nearly every aspect of production. The only suitable vantage would be that of the press, and to be present, making an empirical observation whilst those engaged in such service would maneuver every component into being, to shutter back and forth. He watched the daily stamping, and the recalcitrant metal, those two elements in cataclysmic confrontation, that being the nature of the whole operation, to house dueling elements dulled down obliterated by hierarchy.

Gwendolyn was his neighbor before they chose to acknowledge either / or had any interest in one or the other. She lived in an upstairs apartment over looking the parking lot, her balcony having caught his attention, he remembered the carved pumpkins, and the holiday decorations, and how she would blatantly accuse him of staring into her balcony door passing-by. Nothing could be further from the truth, but it made for the casual anecdotal as time wore on, it made for the casual anecdotal and didn't come off as contrived to their spectral audience of believers, it contained as would every other story concerning their origin, it contained a nascent kernel of eccentricity, their nascent kernel fallen embers from the nucleic plasma engendered by contact. Their discourse frail imprisoned in atomies discursive, yielded submissively to a radial percussive beat, frail phonon sound, trailed down recursive corridors. Both lived on the N.E. side of town, not that they themselves were entitled to any share of the blanket trust companies littering gutters and dispensaries, but where the eccentricities of their orbits would drift them into collision, the only such place where granular movements could be predicated.

Life had assembled itself, were he to delude himself whole-heartily, life had conspired to assemble itself into a comfortable bourgeois existence. To punch the clock daily at a job he hated, marry his neighbor, in a few years buy a house and have kids, buy all sorts of consumer discretionary items, complain as they were to break down to fellow co-workers whom share in the same frustrating dilemma...It's all a fiction, and when it comes crashing down, not only have you ruined your life, but you've dragged to hell your collective "hostages to fortune." He watched Sophie conscript herself to this myth, watched her go down neatly paved streets, where every house on the block looks the same, no longer built to withstand the concussive forces of aerial bombardment, but built outside of city limits to dodge taxes in funny little townships administered by Ponzi Scheme victims. And yet he was the duped who had gotten himself engaged, and how to justify an apparent contradiction to all this latent misanthropy? There are no simple answers, and to be an adult is to contradict yourself, to do it over and over again without correction, again and again with impunity. He loved Gwen, and not in the traditional sense, because there was and is nothing traditional about the two of them as individuals, and there was and is nothing traditional about them as a pair. They were both deserters .