Wisdom?

by Skrubly


        "Love," the old man said, "is patently absurd."  He was not old
because he was eighty-three, he was old because he wore a real hat like
people did a long time ago and shook his cane at people as they walked
past his front porch.

        "Never trust a woman, because they'll drive you to drink." he
said after that. I was six years old at the time and didn't realize that
women would drive me to drink as well as other things.  But it was
strange when I began to eventually try and figure out what love is.

        It was when the dreams came, and it was when the clouds
started to pour across the valley in the evening, that emotions seemed
to be something real to me.  No longer were they something to look at
with a cynical eye from across the room; my facade of stability and
dependibility began to crack and tumble.

        The sheets were a faded yellow color and the curtains were not;
it was late in the morning and I was supposed to be at work but I
wasn't.  It was an unusual dream, more like a movie than anything else,
with surrealistic aspects that always seem normal in a dream.  A man was
attempting to shoot me in a parking lot, and the horizon pitched and
turned before me. I could see the gravel in the moonlight as we
struggled for the gun.  Eventually the conflict ended and we walked down
to the shack where they served beer underneath a yellow sodium light.
Inside the shack there was a woman who took me in her arms and I had
held her there while looking at the beer on the table and wondering if
the man would have really killed me.  Then I felt the ice around my
heart cracking and falling away, and a warmth flowed between her eyes
and mine.

        Then I turned over in my bed and a noise of rocks breaking
outside woke me, and the curtains now looked yellow as the sun was
shining through them.