The Purpose

PREFACE, I GUESS

This is a short story about what you would be prepared to sacrifice in order to save a life. If it was not only your future on the line, but also your past. Not only the places you are going, but the footprints you have left behind. If it was all of it, all of you, who would you give yourself up for?

To be quite honest with you, if someone financed my insomnias, I would be putridly rich. So I made one decision, late one night during Christmas Break. Looking sleeplessly at the walls of my shoebox apartment was getting quite burdensome, really. I opened my laptop, and after a few clicks, I hit play on "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone". It was all downhill from there, no doubt about it. No choice but to rewatch everything. Reread everything. Fill my head with something else, for a change. My mom and dad were sleeping in the same apartment they bought when they were in their twenties, a few kilometers away. You see, we had received the news that my dad had cancer. I was very tired; it had been a long and strange college year, and I had been thinking a lot about the choices families make. Every day, everywhere, we go down one road or another. We play around; we stay at home; we fall in love and fall asleep right next to each other. We discover we need someone to sweep us off our feet to realize what time really is.

So I'm trying to tell a story about that. And intertwine it with the universe I hold most dear.

I live about 20 kilometers away from my parents, near the college I go to. So, in retrospect, I think this story was not just about how I felt about love and death that night during Christmas Break when falling asleep seemed impossible, but also about my feelings for the place where I grew up. Maybe all people have that feeling deep down, that the home you grow up in is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it's not home anymore. We're not trying to make peace with it. Not with the streets and bricks of it. Just with the person we were back then. And maybe forgive ourselves for everything we thought we would become and didn't. Maybe you will find this to be a strange story, I don't know. But I hope my younger self would have read it and found it to be . . . well . . . not horrible. I think she and I could have gone for a beer. Talked about choices. I would have shown her pictures of myself, and she would have said, "Okey. You did okey." Anyway, this is the story. Thank you for taking the time to read it.