What is Life?

Life is when Scott says twist up some bud, or when Rachel calls small objects, like baby banana’s or cute miniature sized toys, little guys. Life is riding a roller coaster or acting pretentious at a coffee-shop porch, basking in an afternoon summer sun with a tattered novel and lit cigarette burning in the ashtray; or, swimming in the ocean. Life is pop rocks and shoes and wrist clocks and hot apple cider on a snow day, funnel cakes and bicycle rides when you were ten – or when you turn thirty-five and decide to randomly and drunkenly cruise on your son’s Huffy as if you were ten years-old again; and, watching marshmallows melt into hot chocolate. Life is the way a tack moves into drywall as it is pushed in, or the way you can miss a pretty stray cat on the side of the highway because you are driving 60 MPH and not paying attention to the wonderful world around us. Life is witnessing people jump out of tall buildings which are on fire, or a man who would want to eat the brains of another man, or woman, for that matter. And life is staying up late kept going by the chirps of birds and early morning dew on grass, writing, and then reading and then not even knowing what it means or meant or how it was even written in the first place. Life is the ocean air and pumpkin spice drop cookies and cafe mochas and shrimp and pita’s delivered at five in the morning. Life is a little girl at work who holds your hands the whole time so you can't work at all and just think how cute it is to have a 7 year old girlfriend.

Life is a brown skin-and-bones child on a swing-set alone near a dilapidated jungle gym I saw one day during a walk I took to feel better about the fact that my wife left me. It was on a gorgeous afternoon in Spring, a day whose air was roses and freshly cut grass. He was on the swing, in the air like a bird or a paper airplane or a Frisbee; basically anything that defies gravity and rises on currents of invisible breaths with a backdrop of a crystal-clear ocean-blue sky where swirls of clouds wisped around like the steam after a hot shower once its free and liberated. Life was transcendental and universal, and beautiful and gorgeous, and interesting and fun, and cute and crazy, and funny and nostalgic, and everything. He was on a swing and he went back and forth and I could only see the top of his head or the bottom of his butt but every now and then I caught his open-mouthed smile in the middle of his pendulum swing and I thought to myself, This is life, man.