pretty girls dream tropical birds
11:11PM
Consider a tropical bird—be it a macaw, because that is the only one I can remember off the top of my head. I am not much of a literary virtuoso, so please don’t wait for my description of a macaw flowing through the air somewhere in Peru. I believe that the human brain is more than capable of constructing an image of a macaw; maybe it is better to imagine it that way, because you have the power to give it five limbs and four eyes.
Now, imagine this bird flying in an endless ocean. Close your eyes and give the setting enough time to flow through you. It feels relaxing and complete, like something finally coming to an end. There is nothing in there to tell how far the macaw has gone. Maybe it had just started and flew for a solid minute before you wandered around with your god’s view, aboard his journey.
Now this feeling of calm and completion feels quite riveting. It makes me want to think of a tropical bird flying through an endless ocean which to me means nothing by all aspects, but still somehow incites a feeling that makes it fascinating, at the least. But I will drop this thought the moment it starts consuming my time. I cannot stand a creature with five limbs and four eyes taking up my precious time, not before it passes every round of interrogation with me asking what value it would bring to my life.
On the contrary, the pretty girl wouldn’t do this. She used to dream of being a tropical bird. She believes the whole point of the macaw is flight itself. It does not need to be reasoned with, and that if it is bright and loud and moving, it is enough of a reason to follow it. For her, it feels so frictionless, so graceful, like it has always belonged there.
I can’t convince myself to go see tropical birds. The whole idea of it just doesn’t make sense to me. I want to say that I like being rational, but being me in this situation is clearly not rational. What is this man, who can’t recall the last time he had fun? And the idea of fun for him now can only be imagined as something that is done while he is on his chair.
Mind you, I really do wish to go see tropical birds. The pretty girl might even convince me to go, but every moment from then on would just be miserable for the both of us. I would try my best to enjoy it, but it wouldn’t happen. She would feel like she’s hogging a man waiting for death since however long, whose only wish in life was to die peacefully in his sleep.
The dead man reminds me of the book I just finished reading, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I actually completed it cover to cover, which hasn’t happened for over three years now. It’s a really short read, but I can’t expect myself to skip three grades and just magically have the patience to finish the thickest book on my bookshelf. I really liked it. I liked it because of how I felt about myself after looking at myself through the lens of the book.
I feel like there is some stuff there that better says what I would have wanted to say, so I’ll just comment on that.
"But if that's so," he said to himself, "and I am quitting this life with the consciousness that I have ruined everything that was given me, and it is impossible to rectify it, what then? " He lay on his back and started going over his whole life in a totally new way. In the morning, when he saw the footman, then his wife, then his daughter, then the doctor-their every movement, their every word confirmed the terrible truth revealed to him that night. In them he saw himself, all that he had lived by, and saw clearly that it was all not right, that it was all a terrible, vast deception concealing both life and death. This consciousness increased his physical sufferings tenfold. He moaned, and thrashed, and tore at his clothes. It seemed to be choking and crushing him. And for that he hated them.
The feeling I got while reading this was eerily similar to what I feel with the pretty girl. What the pretty girl reminds me of is how I have been so wrong for so long. It makes me hate her. It makes me feel like a caged-up thing, degraded from being human because I don’t want to go see the tropical birds.
The chief torment was the lie—the lie accepted by everyone, that he was not dying but merely ill, and that he only needed to keep calm and undergo a treatment, and then something very good would come of it. He knew it was a lie, he knew they knew it was a lie, and yet they persisted in lying. This lie, carried on at the very edge of death, degraded the awful, solemn act of his dying into a petty, wretched, and trivial thing.
I resent the pretty girl.
I feel covetous inside me. I want to have everything she has, while also wanting to prove her wrong every step of the way. Both of which cannot go together, and I’m selfish enough to choose both. I want to tell her that somewhere in following the macaw, there is some fundamental problem that she can’t see—but that is not true. I want to say this for the sole reason of making myself the sufferer, the chosen one who bears the burden of knowing. To carry the truth as my illness. The truth of knowing that I have to stand with all my sickness, the kind the pretty girl pities me for, all the while knowing—quietly, viciously—that she is the one who is sick.
What tormented Ivan Ilyich most was the fact that no one pitied him as he wanted to be pitied.
I feel like Ivan Ilyich was left in this state not because people thought of him as an ill old man who was suffering and pitied him, but more so because people thought of him as someone declining from the fame and status he once had—which he is doing to himself, knowingly. I don’t know how to put into words how I feel like this often. Maybe I’ll come back and complete this someday.
Also, for any pretty girls who dream of tropical birds reading this-
I don't hate you, there might just be a slight energy mismatch
You can't convince me to go see the tropical birds but I still want you to try because I would love finding pleasuring in going to see tropical birds.
You might consider me dull and boring and devoid of life, and I would agree.
I love having this one singular thing to look up to, and after that the next big thing. but for me to want that thing, it should be of reason, reason that nobody could argue against.