I had a friend.
We went back decades.
Throughout most of those years we would have laid down our lives for each other.
But, as with most things of this nature, the courses of our days diverged from time to time.
No longer producing the mirror image that good friendship affords but rather the stark contrast that marks all things individual and individualist above the genetic baseline.
And he went on to some small financial success and failure and I?
I remain the hopeless dreamer and schlepper. Experiential baggage, detritus perhaps, the desperate and pitiful wanna-be, the farcical travesty of the noble savage. Enkidu to his Gilgamesh.
I never could acquire a passion for learning one brand of clothing from the next.
Or dining at restaurants where the famous and the celebrated eat.
I never could get my head around gambling or sports or even simple economics.
And the thought of going out drinking with wealthy people "I really should get to know" seemed anathema to me. When such rare opportunities arose, I would run home, crawl under the blanket and pick up another history book - of which details I would promptly forget or, at best, recall with maximum hyperbole and apocryphal abandon.
In the final years of our friendship, he was given to interjecting when I spoke.
"Irrelevant."
"But-."
"-Yeah I know what you're going to say but it's irrelevant."
This barb, this fiery arrow, wend its way into almost every half conversation we shared towards the end.
The vacuum left in the wake of these moments allowed his beautiful and sonorous bluster and increasingly conservative views to flourish and my vague, yet arguably considered, frame of reasoning to barely draw breath in those stifling diatribes masquerading as conversations.
Irrelevant.
And I'm here and he is not.
WHY am I still here?
After all, he had something to contribute
To this life.
To this world
To you and me and the present and future and just possibly
To past generations.
He was fantastical in oratory and in action
And I am ordinary with nothing to offer anyone.
No offspring.
No sage and assured words
No deeds or actions worthy of note, let alone posterity.
The slowly eroding paragon of a life of devout selfishness.
I will not be remembered.
But I am here and he is not.
In my irrelevance I have a place.
So if you too are irrelevant, then faultless and flawless logic dictates that you too have a place.
In this life.
In this world.
In your own eyes.
And in the eyes of others.
And perhaps like me, you're too lazy to actually make a freak flag,
let alone hold it high with pride.
But if you're reading this
then know that for a second, a synaptic fraction, a lifetime, this irrelevant non-entity is glad that you are in the world.
Mirror man.
