There is an old man in a film, tucked in with other hobos on a train rattling through the night. "Oh, I've seen much worse than this." He says. It is something you say to shut people up. We are all whiners by nature, complaining about every gnat given half the chance. We are children, pointing at scraped knees, showing the world what has happened, looking for sympathy. Or more simply put, a little attention. There is nothing like suffering in silence, in invisibility.
The idea of writing a message, cramming it in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean might be different. Instead of asking for some stranger to acknowledge your pain, you are asking someone you have never met to listen to your wish.
Wishing and complaining, hoping and stumbling through life we grow old. We grow fat and pale. We grow slow and sad. We grow no wiser at times, no kinder at times. We are who we are.
Today, I asked myself what I could actually talk about. The list of things I not allowed to discuss, or banned from mentioning, or have been blackmailed and threatened about, it is one hell of a long list. I can talk about the sky, but only if I do not mention strange smells and how it looks green on bad days. I can talk about talking, about what it is to sit at a bar with someone that knows you well, staring into the bottoms of glasses as you wrestle with the secrets of living. To mumble, and wonder, to laugh and ask questions of the very air around you, air that will never know what to say. But you are there, let's say at Vazacs on B and it is Christmas Eve and it feels like nobody loves you. The bartender gives you both a round on the house and you toast to her, and each other, and your lives unfolding into the dim light of the next year and the one after that. And then, some years later you have children, and someone you love, and have scraped together a few pearls of wisdom. You have not forgotten how to laugh, and even as the world is dying, as the sky is falling you can make each other laugh, hiding in a shed, cracking wise and saying "we'll talk soon." That is how we stop complaining, and how we manage our hard days.
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