The Great Pelican Boy

Chapter 8

"Would you like to keep walking my boy?" He asked me.

I stared at the sun overhead and thought about the day my dad moved away. I was eighteen, or somewhere around there. It was a moment that I had repressed in my memory for years and only recently had began thinking about it again. I haven't talked to him since, hell I don't even know if he's alive. At the time, I was just happy that I no longer had to deal with him. I remember coming home to him telling my mom that he could no longer look at her face. It at least seemed like he wasn't drunk, but I'll never know for sure. I do know that he wasn't yelling or throwing things across the room. He was calm and collected, something he rarely was. He left without saying goodbye, or any promise of seeing us again. It was a man who had reached the end of the road and decided to turn right onto the dirt path. Maybe he was headed somewhere, I don't know. After that day, my Mom fell apart. She had always been distant from my sister and I, but after he left she hardly spoke. If Lily left out of the blue one day, I would probably find it hard to talk too.

"Red?" I heard from an echo resonating within my skull.

"Sorry, I was just daydreaming." I replied, feeling slightly embarrassed I had ignored him.

"This spot always makes me think about my past and my failures. I can't help but reflect when I'm here, must be the nature of the thing." He responded.

"I was thinking about the day my dad walked out on us." The words left my mouth before I had a chance to catch them.

"When did he leave?" He asked me.

"I think I was about eighteen. The memory has only recently resurfaced and I've been trying to understand why." I told him.

Theo moved closer to me and put his arm around my shoulder. I knew that he would have an answer that was more complex than the situation demanded, but I was willing to wait. Very rarely did I feel any type of lesson was to be learned from talking to other people about my problems. The majority of people seem only to pretend to listen to what you are saying, while they are formulating what they will say in response. I appreciate a conversation that takes longer than normal. It tends to be this way because the other person involved is taking the time to listen to what you have to say before they respond. The time it takes Theo to answer reassures me that he is actually listening. Every time he answered me it felt like it was coming from a wise shaman, deep in the Amazon.

"The mind is one of the greatest mysteries and yet we choose to focus so much of our time on other things. How something can go missing in the mind, only to resurface years later is beyond my understanding. It is as though we are not in control of some things that happen to us, but rather a helpless bystander at will to the wants of the masked ruler." He proclaimed. "Perhaps there is a reason this memory resurfaced. It could be that your unconscious brain has felt it necessary for you to deal with it. Whatever that reason may be, it must be important."

"I wonder if there is anyone who has managed to learn how to control that part of the brain that is left in the shadows. Or is it destined for our mind to be out of our control?" I asked.

"Maybe some things are meant to be left to the unknown, or perhaps, those who have learned how to control this animal like nature of the brain are the enlightened men we learn about from the past." He replied.

I drift off again into a tangent of thought about the curse of existence. This thought has come up throughout most of my adult life and I find it hard to discard. It is as if something inside me wants life to seem pointless and mundane. The idea that an existence containing consciousness is a burden that is to be carried until your foreshadowed demise, is all that i can think of for now. Why give any conscious being the ability to foreshadow our death, if we can never escape or understand it? The thought grips my attention and I find myself helpless to its clutches. I can feel the anxiety start to roll in and fear I may never escape this burrowing idea. I take a few deep breaths and find myself back on the rock, sitting next to the wise elder I have come to value.