out. A voice called out to him, asking if he was alright. All he could do is nod. It wasn`t something strange to him, everyone in the office knew that he could get so absorbed in work, that he could barely acknowledge the presence of others. This was one of the small quirks he had that didn`t bother anyone but his wife.
There was something strange going on. He couldn`t remember the rest of the story now, the story he started telling his friends the night before. His focus was only on that new, fatidic day. The images started moving faster and faster, until they stopped, giving him a vision of his own body when he got the news of his father`s dead. It wasn`t just his body he was looking at. He could see his own thoughts, his feeling, and his memories. There were no feelings. That 10-year old boy was now seeing simply that he didn`t care or couldn`t care. He saw himself trying to sketch an emotion, but he couldn`t do it because his mind was taking over. Trying to rationalize what was happening, Gregory`s mind started thinking of different scenarios, one weirder than the other.
One recurring scenario seemed to settle in. It showed him moving past his grandparents going to the bedroom and turning off that old, colored TV that they were proud of buying a few years earlier. He started watching cartoons again waiting for his family to reach a consensus that this was his way of “handling it”, without rationalizing everything further. But the truth of the matter was he simply didn`t care.
This was the feeling which followed him all his life. The only feeling. It was not that he couldn`t get emotional. He cried at movies, his heart raced when some songs were played. Usually, these were things that no one could see in him. But today, someone caught a glimpse.
The raggedy old man starring to him from his computer screen felt his insecurity. Turning the computer on seemed to be the best option for Gregory, to try to put another image on his screen. It worked for a few minutes as the computer opened and the screen was almost bombarded by spreadsheets, email notifications, and to-do lists. Burying himself into work, Gregory felt at ease. That annoying, error filled spreadsheet he left opened last night was now quickly becoming the best part of his morning. Moving from formula to formula, checking the data entered the night before, with three cups of coffee supporting, was surely helping him. His mind was now pushing out the strange things that happened to him in the past couple of days. From time to time, the old man came back to his mind. No mental efforts could keep him away. They were looking at each other as preparing for one of those academic, pre-prepared debates in which everyone wore their school jackets as they were the most important part of the competition. Gregory was ready to start the pro argument of losing his mind, when a con` argument came from somewhere in his head, as being spoken by his adversary.
“You cannot be mad, as I am not mad also. You`re just telling yourself a story. You shouldn`t care about why or how I ended up here. I`m just interested in how the story ends.”
The old, funny looking man disappeared. Gregory was looking desperately for him now, ignoring the instincts that previously told him to keep away as an encounter would, most likely, lead to a “Cold War” mutually assured destruction look-a-like situation, with neither of them capable of surviving it. He took his beige, silly looking overcoat from the coat rack behind the office door and ran out of the building. Those damp, pothole filled streets that gave away a beautiful, fresh smelling after-rain feel, were something unexpected that day. The sky cleared and it let a few rays of sun hit the pavement. It wasn`t enough to dry it, but it was enough to bother the people and animals wondering the city.
He kept running down the street, not thinking about traffic, the people he was running into or the destination. After 10 minutes, he stopped and stood. Looking frantically around, it seemed that the destination slipped away again, like it did some many times before in his dreams. Gregory never seemed to be able of seeing how his 10 pm story to his friends would have finished if he wouldn`t have been interrupted. Looking back, Gregory was trying to put the pieces back together. He walked to the nearby park, wiped a cold, moist, greenish bench and sat.
Thoughts were spinning inside his mind; blood was rushing towards his brain. He remembered the first words of the story: “looking back at my future, I would not take the chance of changing it”. It seemed odd, to say the least. He never would have said that now, 20 years later.
“You can`t look back to your future. Can you?”
On that day, in the swings, all kids were boxed up around him. But, in the distance, he saw a man that appeared familiar. It was a brown haired man, about 30 years old, unshaved for a few days, wearing a pair of dusty old jeans with a grey t-shit that didn`t seem to match his parka or the baseball cap he had on. The man didn`t say anything. He watched the children listening to the story, never looking away or giving an interest in anything else that was going on around him.
And the story continued. Gregory moved from idea to idea, not being able to grasp and create a single storyline. He saw how the man on the playground grew up; his successes and failures in life, his first love and his biggest disappointments. He started to lose interest in school when he was 11; grades weren`t so interesting anymore. The only thing in school that caught his eyes were a few interesting professors who actually believed that the future of their students was in their hands, thus they must mold it carefully. But even those teachers were not enough. He considered mandatory readings as something he would never do, but, at the same time, read everything else from the 1000+ books library that his mother collected and read them from cover to cover over the years. From the stories of chivalry that were the pinpoint of his life a year before, now his mind was preoccupied with more. He was tired of fiction and surreal worlds where everything bad was wiped by the conquering hero at the end of the story. In this new world that he was manufacturing for himself, the lives of real people took their place. He looked at what happened in the Nazi death camps, being completely horrified that people could do such despicable things to other people. He read about Dachau, Treblinka, and Sobibor. He listened to their stories as if he was there with them.
He saw what the Russians did with their prisoners in those far-away camps in Siberia, which were identified as the Gulag. The day he spent with Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich made him feel the cold, Siberian winds through his clothes and bones, even if there were 25 degrees outside.
He put more value on the little things we have than on the shiny new things that every kid his age wanted to get from their parents.
At the end of secondary school, he didn`t bother reading and learning for his exam. He believed that you can`t get an education from school anymore and that the best education you can have is the one you get from yourself, prioritizing what you want and learning what other people want. He flunked, got in the worst high school in town and started ignoring his education. He was just concerned on getting the grade he needed to go on.
He moved from high school to his Bachelor degree, Masters and PhD. Nothing affected him. He had friends, he laughed and cried, but nothing really mattered. The years passed and he was so concentrated on gathering knowledge, becoming a different man, that he nearly missed out on seeing how he was seen right now. He saw himself as an awkwardly looking nerd, wearing the only pair of jeans that he had in the closet, giving away a sense of despair; that was the impression he had of him. He went through this over and over again as the years passed.
People saw him as an arrogant, skinny looking guy that wanted everyone to like him. In their eyes, this seemed to be the only thing he was reaching for. But he didn`t care about what others we`re saying. He did not care about reasons or the impression his attitude and actions gave to the outside world. He believed that you can reach a different level of awareness, having the capacity of reading other people`s behaviors, personalities, words. He wanted to be better, the best. And the self set indicator was that of having all people like him.
Now, after entering the third decade of his life, nothing he did before seemed to matter anymore. He gave up on his beliefs years ago
, trying to have a better life than the ones he saw his parents, grandparents, friends were having. He forgot how to be happy having the little he used to have and then the feeling of getting shiny, new things which others had overcame him.
Walking slowly back from the park towards his panoramic view corner office, he started losing his thoughts and slipping away towards that feeling of childish joy that he used to experience when the biggest achievement of a day was convincing the parents that he can stay out just one more hour to play with his friends.
The steps carried him back to his office, to the never-ending pile of documents which needed to be approved before the day was over, to the meaningless discussions at the water cooler and to the precious moments of relief when the urgent project of the day was finished and ready to be sent to the bosses that buried it in another pile of documents which needed to be approved and sent higher up the hierarchy.
At around 5 pm on the same day, he called his wife, telling her that he`ll be a couple of hours late because the annoying boss, who hated his own life and Gregory`s way of being, wanted yet another
A Dreamer`s Guide To Reality Page 3