Summers And Sunsets

What a terrible power is bestowed upon he who can, and does, smash a smile that is untethered by the foolish concerns of a stringent society. It is a power derived from the self-righteous inspiration of self-discipline, so sharp in contrast to the airy smile whose only discipline is desire. The jealousy of such an undisciplined freedom is that which drives the hard word and the judgmental gaze. Cruel ironies rise from the attacker's seething surface when he realizes that the very thing that his self-imposed rigidity had hoped to cultivate was that which was, instead, banished from his presence.



There's a sunny bench in front of a convenience store that holds a girl in a light dress, barely covering her legs, that is, yet, heavier than the spirit it contains. Just heavy enough to keep her from floating off on the breeze in a laugh. The bounce with which she moves reveals her ethereal composition and the resulting, airy frame is so free of sharp angles that nothing undesired, nothing not willingly adhered to, can stick. Her ungrounded appearance sets her apart from the downtrodden eyes of all the others who pass in and out of the drugstore, all checking off items on their list of errands. Without a definable purpose, she is more purposefully driven than any of these people who vainly scribble personal functions onto a list in lieu of truly understanding what they need.



She is wondering how to react to the boy in the car who's pulled up alongside. She's wondering what brought him around for a second hello. He's still trying to figure out what sort of emotional entity he's going to see this time. Is it the cautious personality that quietly divulged secret drink contents on a red trolley? Is it the lonely and heartbroken character that cried on a curb in the midst of a post-festival throng? Or is it going to be the one he is hoping for, she whose eyes lit up, redirected, when a barely familiar face asked her what she was doing on the ground, so far below the faces of those passing around her? He's wondering how anyone can find redeeming happiness in something so small as himself, and how anyone can experience extremes of emotion in such rapid succession. He hasn't yet realized that, like all who dance even when there are no dance floors, she is the primal emotion that dismisses pure reason and all other constrictors of unbridled reactions to one's surroundings. It will be later that he will come to understand that he didn't just want her, he wanted her in him, to steal some of the spirit that his society taught him to wash himself of. For a second, her bubble of influence overwhelms the old thought process and he kisses her from the driver's seat, she in the passenger, without any of the courtship ritual that he has been taught is proper. The emotion takes over, impulsively and naturally, if but for the instant, while the bright San Diego sun bears down on the inside of the car.



Days pass and he can hide his darker influences in a shroud of worldly intellectuality, preaching about the ills of American society and its international influence, and she likes him because, on the outside, he seems like she is on the inside. He can hide it for the short time he has to and before she leaves he imbibes the essence of agenda-less exploration of new things, flitting from place to place, seeing things via her eyes in his hometown that, before, seemed never even to have been there at all. He can't connect the dots. Its all too close, too present, to understand. He can't comprehend how, on the brink of ecstasy, he can't perform, and years later he reflects on the subconscious fear of combining his structured self with another that is unchained from the rules by which he has led his life. Deep inside, some fear of losing an identity that has defined him sabotages the very thing that his structured personality has, via its rules and strictures, endeavored to aspire to. He takes her home on her last day in town and drives away as he sees her return to a curbside, watching, and waiting, it seems, for him to leave before she starts crying again. Its a scene he's seen, but he can't stop to pick her up and kiss her again from across the car cabin. Like some ill-gotten immune system, his internal self has hardened itself against this wonderful, emotional freedom that she has so readily put on display. His hand is a little shaky on the wheel, betraying the remainder of the struggle that is being ground into the past that each turn of the tires is creating, and the hand slowly steadies.



A year passes and the stage is, beyond his imagination, set again as it was. The play begins again and, as he sits in the car with her in a new lot, he fails to notice the darkness of night that has descended on their parking spot. The moonlight shines through the glass panes on the roof and it won't be long before both players realize that the play will unfold differently than it did before. A year has been spent in contemplation of and exile from his native women, all of whom seem devoid of freedom, and in the cruelest of ironic reactions, his rigidity has stiffened itself further, seeking to force upon itself the emotional freedom that was formerly in its grasp and slipped through its fingers. The year has been spent in fortification of this manner of thinking, and the walls are redoubled in strength. This time the subconscious is not satisfied with merely sabotaging the coupling of freedom and authority, and it now employs a hidden drive that is as surprising to he as it will be to she, who, unknowingly, approaches with a smile whose potency has diminished in no way since their first meeting. Weapons too long unused are shouldered and fired at a minor physical weakness in her, the most miniscule of unhappy byproducts of an otherwise joy-filled existence. Like well-trained soldiers under the thumb of their military taskmasters, the marksmen of his subconscious train their sights with unfailing accuracy, putting to use all of their linguistic training to hit their target with biting words. She's shocked and he realizes that the tears he alleviated at the fairgrounds have returned, now of his own making. She leaves for home again, crying, but not this time out of desire to stay, but rather to leave. The smile is smashed and the brightness of its reflection, once willingly shined on him, is turned instead away from him. The primacy of his rule-based existence is confirmed as it lords over the kiss of a year ago, reminding him that even then, she sat in her seat and he in his, divided by the console in between that is empty but for the imagined and constructed wall that he has embodied it with.



The fallout of the horrible, full circle that the play and its sequel have formed is the revelation of time to come, when the fallacy of the structured machine will be revealed in the self-replicating damnation that it is when the veil, so long carried to fool the host into thinking that happiness could be forged from within it, is torn free. In the extremity of hindsight it can be seen that the two actors in these dramas were complete in their internal opposition, and that regardless of his need to develop freedom out of structure, only by the utter breaking of that order could the smile that is bred of disorder be experienced, not only via another, externally, but also internally. Self-created, it seeks others like itself, not to keep its own fire burning, for freed of the opposing structure it is inextinguishable, but instead for the joy experienced by the exponential reflections of smiles that are created by the absence of a bereft and absorbing antithesis to them. Suddenly, the simple and intoxicating rhythm becomes understood, replacing the undanceable complexity of the overlaid rhythms and melodies that the cold, calculating, and structured mind demanded as intellectual entertainment. Suddenly, time spent lying in a sunstream is not unproductive, but, in fact, the productive requirement that puts the air in the dress and the breeze on the smile. Bucket seats are thrown out in favor of couches and division and isolation joins the change between the cracks of their cushions. How does one make up for having doused and denied the world, if even for a moment, the brightly burning smile that is the essence of that which our forlorn species finds desirable? Only in the erasure of the influence that drove her away is the real redemption found, for it gone, a thousand sources that once frowned begin too to smile and the multiplication of the effect, optimism born of pessimism, overrules all.