A Path Amongst the Trees

Every morning he goes for a walk down a path amongst trees. It's a small trail in a park at the edge of town, where he can see some greenery, listen to the birdsongs and stop thinking about his life for a while.

Let's start from the beginning. The young man who likes to walk down this path without thinking about his life is an unemployed nurse in his late twenties, who has recently broken up with a young hairdresser and who lives with his retired father and housewife mother in a relatively small apartment. In addition to that, his grandmother who weighs 260 pounds moved in with them recently because she can't walk anymore, so he is forced to sleep in the dining room, on an uncomfortable sofa, since his grandmother wanted to have her own room and that was the term they agreed upon if he wanted her to give him her pension. So, you could say that he rented his room to his grandmother. That rent is his only source of income since eighteen months ago, when his short term contract with a cancer treatment clinic expired and was not renewed.

At home he feels restricted. His fat grandmother occupies every living space, not because of her size, but because of her irritating, unbearable babbling and her constant demands. To put it simply, all three members of the family act as her servants and don't even dare object to any of her demands, not only out of respect and love, but also out of fear of losing this additional income which has become indispensable now that the son is unemployed. It was only the other night that they were forced to turn her down, and that was only because she woke up at four in the morning and wanted to eat octopus stew. After a couple of hours of negotiations she accepted to go back to sleep after eating some lentil soup which had been left over from dinner. It's highly doubtful whether she actually realized that it would be practically impossible for them to buy an octopus so early in the morning. This, more or less, is the situation at home. Thankfully the winter has gone by and our young man can go out on the small balcony and smoke one and a half packs of cigarettes every afternoon.

The young man chain smokes for hours, lost in his dark thoughts. He seems to have lost all hope and each afternoon he inhales despair and exhales smoke out of his mouth. He can't stop smoking because then his hands would simply drop to the sides of a body trapped inside nowhere, and if his hands were to drop maybe he would contemplate suicide, and that is something he doesn't want at all. Smoking however, even though it seems to comfort him momentarily, leaves an awful taste in his mouth which doesn't go away no matter how long he brushes his teeth every night. So, he goes to sleep every night on the dining room sofa, having that bad taste in his mouth, and his thoughts grow even darker before turning into bad dreams. He had always been a bit of a hypochondriac because of his job. Now he is certain that he'll die of cancer. He just wishes that it will be a fast death and that he won't have to suffer as much as all these patients that he took care of these few months when he worked at the clinic, back then when he didn't smoke at all and he was saving his money to get married some day.

The young man was never much of an optimist, not even during happier times. Small fears would always grow in his mind, but he always managed to drive them away, to tear them out forcefully and decisively, to drown them or even to ignore them and keep on moving forward. Now the fear has grown to gigantic proportions inside of him, conquering each and every corner of his soul. He is afraid that he'll never get a job, that he'll never have a family, that he'll spend his life on the balcony and on the sofa and that soon, smoking will make him sick and what will he do then without any insurance? In addition to all that, watching all these documentaries about natural disasters makes him think that there's an earthquake whenever his grandmother walks around the old, creaky floor with her walker. When it's raining really hard he thinks that he's going to drown or that his cigarette butts will reignite, setting their apartment on fire, along with their building, this awful town and this country and that nothing will be left but ashes in the sky.

The young man has many friends, but as of late he doesn't feel like going out and he envies all these people with their jobs and their money. He is ashamed of talking with girls that he doesn't know because the word "unemployed" is very humiliating, so he shuts himself in. He reads a book every now and then and he goes to the cinema once a month, but in general his life consists of browsing through job ads, sending out résumés without ever receiving an answer, some dead end job interviews, documentaries, one and a half packs of cigarettes on the balcony and restless sleep on the uncomfortable sofa. And the path amongst the trees.

We will describe today's walk along this path amongst the trees, because something different happened today which may be worth mentioning. But we'll start off a little earlier, from the moment when the young man opens his eyes. It's not a pleasant awakening, because he starts to feel this awful taste in his mouth. A while back he heard someone closing the door, so his father must have gone out to get a cup of coffee. His mother and his grandmother seem to be having an intense conversation. He just wants to sleep some more, to get lost in sleep so that he won't have to think, but his grandmother's squeaky voice pierces his ear and his brain. His eyes open automatically and he gets up hurriedly, wanting to get out of this suffocating apartment. As he furiously washes his teeth, his mother comes and stands by the bathroom door. This is, more or less, the conversation that follows:

"Your grandmother isn't well."

"Why, what's wrong with her?"

"I think that she's lost it."

Grandmother comes in with her walker, causing a small earthquake, and says to him conspiringly:

"Didn't I paint the house beautifully?"

He looks at her and goes on furiously brushing his teeth. He's upset, but he doesn't want to yell at her because she does seem kind of sweet in her pink night gown with her hair standing up.

"Didn't I paint the house beautifully?", she says again, looking as if she's lost in a dream. "I painted the walls and the ceilings. I was painting all night."

She imitates the movements of a painter with her chubby hand. His mother seems panic stricken and keeps staring at her awkwardly.

"Great", he thinks. "Grandma's lost it. One more disaster."

He rinses his mouth, combs his grown out hair and goes out of the bathroom. He goes to his room, shuts the door and gets dressed quickly. He hears them go on from outside, " But I did paint the house, no you didn't, it was just a dream, no I was painting all night, no you weren't, dear God, what's come upon us, we need to call a doctor, where's your father now, I painted it well, no you didn't, it was just a dream", and so on.

He gets out of his room, devastated by this new disaster, but to his surprise his mother and his grandmother were laughing.

"It was just a dream! How did I get so confused?", says grandmother.

"Thank God, she's not lost it. She was just fresh out of sleep", says his mother and crosses herself.

"OK then, I'm going out", he replies.

"God bless you, my little boy", he hears his grandmother say as he shuts the door and presses the elevator button.

On the bus ride to the park, as he gazes at the ugly city through the window, he suddenly turns his head and sees a guy with red hair who is wearing somewhat strange clothes and has an equally strange stare sitting opposite to him. And then he is filled with terror. He fears that this redheaded man will blow up the bus or that he will threaten the bus driver with a gun and hold the passengers hostage, just as he'd seen in some documentaries, even though they were about much more dangerous cities. His palms are sweating and his heart is beating fast. He gets up and sits elsewhere so that he won't have to see this redheaded man, who actually wasn't strange at all, except from being an unkempt teenager with a hair color that didn't flatter him much. We should note that our young man is not paranoid nor is he actually afraid. He's just playing games with his mind because his life has become unbearably predictable, boring and bland, so he'd probably like to feel like he's starring in an action movie for a while. He just wishes for something to happen.

And here we are, at the path amongst the trees. The young man gets down from the bus and starts walking along the path. By focusing on the greenery and the birds, for these fifteen minutes, while he walks, he can feel nice and breathe without thinking about being unemployed, about the future and all the disasters that it has in store for him. So, he has a nice walk for about fifteen minutes, he forgets about his life and suddenly, as he sits on the last bench, as always, he imagines himself being old, but not old and homeless as he usually does. Old, with a pension and children. What if it all turned out well? What if they gave him a job at a private clinic, what if he fell in love again, what if he got married and had children, what if no catastrophic earthquake happened nor the country broke apart as they said it would. What if he quit smoking or didn't quit but didn't die of cancer, or if he never came across a dangerous terrorist on the bus?

These were his thoughts, and instead of pulling out a cigarette out of the pack, as he usually did, he took out a pen that he always carried with him and wrote a poem which more or less went like this:

I am an old man

I've been ready to pass on for some time now

I spent my life predicting disaster

And waiting for it to ravage me

Now my time is over

I've not any more to live

None of the disasters

That I was expecting

Ever came

And my life

Was ravaged

By fear alone

So this is what took place today, on the path amongst the trees. Unfortunately, we can't make any guarantees regarding this young man. We don't know if the country will eventually break apart, if he'll find a job, a wife, if he'll have children, not even if his grandmother will keep giving him her pension. We don't know if he'll quit smoking, what he'll die of, nor can we guarantee one hundred percent that he won't fall victim to a terrorist attack in this town or another. There is no deeper meaning to this story. The only thing that we could say is that often we use our fear to fill some of the holes in our lives, to avoid feeling happy or simply because that's how we've learned to think. Most probably the young man will revert to his despair, he'll waste away his noon watching documentaries about natural disasters, he'll smoke one and a half packs of cigarettes on the balcony in the afternoon and at night he'll go to bed with this awful taste in his mouth.

However, today, in the path amongst the trees, on the back of a pack of cigarettes, he wrote a poem.