He was what you would call a jolly fellow, almost always happy and funny or trying, almost always ready to crack a joke or to shake your hand with smiling eyes, constantly beginning to tell you a story which will never be finished because half way thru it spun into another story even funnier which spiraled away endlessly until the audience dissolved in side conversations or within the microcosm of their smartphones. Not a soul of a party kind of guy, too boring by far for that, but easy going enough and with the bare minimum amount of insight and prejudice topped with a moderately foul language to make him an agreeable dinner guest. Friendly and helpful, he always seemed a dependable guy with whom I would definitely want to hang out from time to time, but somehow too self-focused and too exuberant in his conversational style to be able to put up with more than one or two hours at the local pub.

I already knew him for a while when I began to understand thru a succession of events which I will not disclose here that underneath his social animal persona lied a quite sad and at times truly depressed individual, whose moods and fits varied widely and reached extremes hard to suspect. Once I seen it for the first time, it was henceforth abundantly clear that his insatiable need to talk to just about anybody just about anything, but preferably about himself, was a way of coping with the relentless assaults of melancholy and despair which sapped his inner self. Wave after wave, a stormy ocean of nightmares dark green and swollen and tinged with purple greenish white disgusting foam washed the black beaches of his mental sanity dragging each time pebbles and sand grains of him back into the abyss. Seeking the shelter of other people’s attention and trying to occupy his mind with a never-ending succession of hobbies and flimsy interests, none of them a real passion, all of them little more than this weeks’ topic, he was constantly hiding away amongst people the way a runaway convict hides from a life sentence in a busy market street.

When I finally confronted him about it, he seemed relieved and eager to talk about my observations. He was quick to agree with me, but to my surprise, he didn’t seem upset at all with his mental frailty which he saw more like an interesting hand of cards he was dealt with, not necessarily his preferred combination, but just as good or bad as anything random could be. While listening to him speculate various theories about his condition, I realized that there is more to it than it seems, that somehow at the bottom of that bottomless pit, buried in the grinded bones of ancient fish which haunted the sea of his fears, glimmered a seed of pure joy. A minuscule touch of warmth, a tiny cusp of sunshine, the smallest imaginable quantity of human kindness and sheer, unblemished happiness burned on and gave him just enough heart to go on, to move and speak and dance. Would have not been for this minute but inexhaustible flame, he would have crumbled in broken pieces of silence and tears of absurd sorrow.

Many years after we had that reveling conversation, long after we parted ways casted by life on different shores, I was returning home from somewhere and midflight over the Atlantic, while I was teasing my boredom with a brilliant haiku of the old school master, I suddenly saw him in a different way. It became clear to me that the glittering gem of light which I sensed in him was not of solid gold or diamond, but just a shell, a thin foil of brilliance containing within itself the remnants or the stem cells of an idea. Less than an idea perhaps, maybe just a barely remembered dream, the lingering caress of a touch of wind on your skin on a sunny summer day. This fugitive glimpse of a thought was the source of his ultimate strength, the rope that tied his suicidal hands to life itself and if it would have ever persisted long enough to be transformed in words, it would have spelled: “nothing really matters”

I shuddered when I realized that he was a kindred soul of mine, that, briefly and only from time to time, he felt, like me, that nothing really matters, that you live for a while and then you die and that’s all there is to it. The starry sky, the gentle breeze, the smiling kids and their cries as well, the flowers and the poetry of love are nothing more than empty shapes we fill each day with the illusion of a meaning to keep ourselves calm and busy while waiting in line to be slaughtered by time. The pine tree shadowing my house, the yellow sickle of the moon climbing in the dark sky, the red round sun setting ablaze at the end of my street, all of them were here long before I open my eyes and will be here long before I will be gone and my life and my dreams and fears leave no mark on them. This is well known, but rarely felt and feeling it to the full extent is liberating. Only when you sit at the edge of your soul, beyond all masks and pretense, and you acknowledge that you are no more than a few cells living for a blink of an eye, you can experience true freedom, for only by breaking the shackles of consequences we can truly be happy.

The most heroic victory, the largest empire ever ruled by the man, the fiery joy and bitterness of loving someone, the miracle of giving life and the unforgivable sin of taking one, all the objects of our passions and all our achievements carry as much inherent happiness as a glass of chilled Chablis. It is our own choice to make things around us matter and it is us deciding without knowing it if we should suffer or rejoice when aspects of reality appear or disappear.

The old Greeks knew it, for they locked Hope in Pandora’s Box and while there was no hope, the ephemeral and the eternal merged into a golden age of war and love and peace with the inevitable, a golden age which shattered when empty promises were made and welcomed lies were casted on our slowly dying eyes. Fear Itself was born out of our vain, irrational desires for immortality and fear is still shadowing our minds, making us scream when we are butchered by the cleaver of our indomitable destiny. There are many paths to happiness and most of them are straight and righteous, but the only one which leads me out of panic without deceiving me is the profound acknowledgement that life is finite while death is undisturbed silence. And that my life does not shine in the bigger diorama of our world more than the quiet, starry love of a firefly. And even more, the last person on earth to miss me and suffer my loss when I will be dead is myself, for my death is painful to me only when it is not real, but dreaded. There is no sorrow in death or smallness of one’s life, there is sorrow only in fear and hope, because only the person that is thirsty cares if the glass is half full or not.

I must stop now, it may be that the earthly smells and sounds of this rainy spring and the ritual meditations which must accompany the Easter Day pushed me into remembering my long lost friend with warmth and joy, but I will not take this further as there is no reason to freeze in letters the substance of our inner selves. Here is to you, my brother, here is to you, I raise this glass half filled with wine and smile at the thought that you may raise the other half of it somewhere, sometime in celebration of our brief epiphanies. Or maybe not. It does not matter.