A moment alone with her

I look at the fluffy white sheep grazing within the azure-melting-into-indigo sky and begin to question my mortality. I would like to be with her for all eternity. Naturally, I desire that we live until time's end. My Chilean wife, mother of my future children and my beautiful partner, lies next to me on the cool blades of grass beneath our backs. The warm breeze whispers their questions in our ears as we ponder existence. Why do I love her? Our relationship has demonstrated to me a thousand reasons why. Her heart beats for me and I for her. She lets me know this every day by the way she laughs at all the silly things that I say. 

Does life have much meaning without her? No. It would be insipid.

What set the gears of fate in motion when we met? Time places no weight on my shoulders while we're here dreaming together, fingers intertwined while resting on the grass. We will be together forever, I think to myself as this thought gently turns the tips of my lips towards my forehead. What of the beginning or the end? I conclude that their is neither in this timeless stretch of tranquility. The buttery sun spreads its rays across the horizon as day turns to twilight, yet still we remain feeling the zephyrs dance through the locks of our hair. There is no place I'd rather be, here beneath the early crescent glow of the moon. Seemingly, he winks at me as if sharing our secret happiness. 
Yet, its not a mystery to any of our friends or family. They saw it coming, the way we flirted with each other when we first met. Sure, I was a bit crazy with my thoughts of Buddha and solving the world's problems, but I was also crazy for her. 

My memories stretch back years to when we first met in the Spanish club. I was working on a Ph.D in psychology in the University of Otago in New Zealand and she was having fun traveling the country and learning the difficult language that is English. While we had our quarrels, none were long-lasting, and all were mild. Something just clicked between us that continues into today. Maybe our common culture, or the way we share the joke about loving life, but hating people. I don't really know for sure, but something told me that since we could often tell what each other was thinking, we were meant to share a life together. I will love her until the sun supernovas.

~Albereez

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Cardboard Universe

We took a long walk one gloomy September afternoon and we became lost. We ambled through a vast garden of wasted cardboard boxes A land of grays and brown hues. Various shapes and sizes of corrugated board flooded our sights and all that could be seen for miles were these small shanties of solitude. The sky was clouded over. A thick haze that seemed to blend in with the surroundings was all that one could observe above and beyond. Why we were here, you and I, was a mystery for it all seemed so unreal. Not another human around in this desolate garden of human refuse but ourselves.

The more we ambulated, the further we were from somewhere. For we moved on legs of string-cheese; wobbly at the knees. Left and right were non-different from forward and backwards and no matter in what direction we turned, we saw the same dreary scene. But we had each other and this was enough to cut through our stark decrepitude. Yet we were all alone. Together but alone, and a cold wind scrapped us to the bone.

I tried to speak but my mouth was sewed tightly shut so my silent screams only resonated within my skull. Yet you could understand my apparent distress. You gently squeezed my hand with a warmth to counteract the biting cold that I felt.  We were in the damnedest of dreams but if not for you, my sweet friend, I would find myself in not a dream but a nightmare.

He, unto himself

His mind is a diamond, the brain, soaking up information like a sponge. He asks God daily for strength to maintain a clear conscience. He sharpens his razor-edge life every morning with prayer and resolve. The straight and narrow is his mode of being. Impure thoughts long faded away. 

Thought control. 
Why? 
For power over self. 

Challenging his animal nature, he somehow manages to win time after time. Every night before bed he tells himself to focus his dreams, a mirror image of the path he takes during the day. This man learns as he sleeps and keeps the demons of capriciousness at bay. 

Always.
These attributes don't squelch his imagination, however. 
His creativity fuels him.

He sees the beauty of God within everything. These things inspire. He challenges himself to think higher, beyond the mundane. There is a spark of life inside of him that turns all his words into fire. Instantaneous combustion of ego sublimating raw essence of being. To exist is far from enough. No, he enjoys experiencing the future as he travels through the present, three steps ahead of the past. With a quiet mind, his actions and the movements of thought are quick, incredibly quick, and light, without the weight of guilt. There is a place within the depth of his heart that is so incredibly strong. It allows him to ask the question, ‘Why?’ without becoming perplexed.

All these ideas, revelations, envelope him. Yet, it is his love for life experiences that really keeps him moving forward.

A final drag off the cancer stick

Nicotine permeates everything he wears. Hot ash burns a hole in his lungs. One last drag off his filthy fag and he's a mummification in progress. His hair is already falling out in gray matted clumps yet he heeds not the warnings plastered on the carton of his toxic cancer sticks. Not long back, twenty tar-stained teeth hung loosely from his rusted jaw, but that was then. This unfortunately was the day his jowls would complete their rotting from the inside out. His blackened breathing apparatus strains under 3 millimeters of plaque-lined pulmonary tissue. He nurses his addiction without realizing that he is 10 hours short of a led-lined coffin. Nonetheless, his blood-shot eyes register a strange finality of living as he sighs his last breath. 

Ages ago, he was radiant. His piercing blue eyes shined with mystery and reflected profound thinking. Woman's heads would turn in his direction as if pulled by some unknown force of attraction. Magnetism could not have been stronger. However, he took a wrong turn when the tobacco industry set their talons deep into his healthy heart. He became a crippled man: a short straw lit up by an unforgiving butane torch. With his first puff, he began a dangerous hobby that would see him to his grave. Every day he took five step's, when others merely took one, towards death's dark doors. He was intelligent. But not enough to realize that smoking would prematurely kill him and destroy his life. 

RIP 1956 - 2010
Mathew Ackerson
Big Tobacco Sales Associate