Purpose
“If you know the why, you can live any how.”
-― Friedrich Nietzsche
My sleep was interrupted by Auline Bukowski’s email in my inbox. I clicked in anxious anticipation; it’s been close to two years, and my eyes opened. 3 a.m. It’s that time when night is showing its age, and the morning is still a trek.
I turned to an audiobook on Greek mythology as my sleep assistant.
In the beginning, there was chaos. Then came the primeval gods, Uranus, Kronos, and Zeus. All god-kings were wary of their children. Kronos swallowed his children. Zeus was saved by his mother, Rhea. She replaced him with a rock. When Zeus poisoned Kronos’s wine, he belched Hades and Poseidon, Zeus’s other siblings. Zeus became king and had dominion over the sky. He swallowed his pregnant wife, Hera, and Athena was born out of his head.
My mind drifted. I scribbled without a paper.
“We spoke about Athena once on an alleyway, and you were saying how the different cultures follow the same kind of deities intrigued you. I looked at your eyes the whole time you spoke, but I listened.”
I don’t know if it’s the existential vacuum, the boredom of a purposeless soul, or the obnoxious nature of middle age that brings me to Auline, but what I know with certainty is that when I’m writing to her, I don’t want to be anywhere else, the moments are no longer a distraction, my being with all its synapses, trillions of particles all in this moment, content in a concentrated singularity. I feel the moment is not fleeting, and I can stay as long as I wish because she will not say she has got to be somewhere else or have a project to complete. I can linger
“I’m trying to sleep here,” I switched the podcast off.
I finished reading “Man’s Purpose in Life.” I will be fifty in a year; that’s a big number. I sometimes lie to make people feel better, telling them what they want to listen to.
I drifted into the unfinished slumber, thinking about Flaco.
Flaco, the owl, was freed last year from the NY zoo; the zoo said it was an act of vandalism. He died hitting a skyscraper a few weeks back. Though he was born in captivity, he learned to fly and hunt last year and gained quite a bit of following among captive New Yorkers. The zoo is looking for the perpetrator, claiming he is responsible for Flcao’s untimely death because he would have never flown high in captivity.
I woke up after a few hours when the morning had properly marinated, sent my email saved in the draft, and added the scribbles, knowing I was flying high.
