Eight Limbs : Story 17 (Draft)

It could have been yet another waking dream of a life half lived and half dead that found Howard lying on his back, not dead, on a pleasantly fragrant black rubber mat, on the floor of a small room meant for more serious movements and thinking by more serious and Goddess-like creatures. It was part of the learning and practice of a way of life that was up until recently foreign to Howard but no less humbling than so many of his other trials and major life events leading to the pleasantly fragrant black rubber mat and the breathing and the dusty floor in the small room.

Howard was supposed to be deep in meditation, eyes closed, concentrating on his breathing, self checking, and feeling good about the activities of the last hours or days or months but as usual he couldn’t relax beyond just being still. Instead and as usual his brain was flashing and making forty-two decibel noises about things he thought he didn’t have to think about or hear from anymore. His brain told him to question if he was really committed to what he signed up for – if this was one of those ‘Do the next right thing’, things like doing the dishes, donating blood or vacuuming cat hair he told himself he needed to do to keep moving away from his ground zero, his Hiroshima, his Halifax harbor. He imagined a grainy moving image of careful and tentative reconstruction, villages and cities following a disaster. The film came into focus, was made sharper by concrete and mortar fortified by medication, caffeine and vitamins that did little more than produce expensive urine. Howard lived most of his life moving haphazardly between life of mind and life of the body and rarely found the bliss that comes from being in both places in the same time.

He was rarely consistently happy or unable to define happy or even when happy happened for those brief periods. He never made notes, never wrote anything down. To stop the forward motion of the moving image would cause the film to reverse, frame by frame, event by event, back to the point of catastrophic explosion and fallout.