A Very Confused “Young” Man

In a swamp somewhere in some long forgotten bayou there once walked a very confused young man although the “youth” was primarily a matter of perspective, the young man having already lived well into his sixth decade. The bayou may also have been more metaphorical than real as the swamp was situated on the tenth floor of an apartment in the central range of the Colombian Andes. The confusion, however, was real, very real, and seemed almost all encompassing which raised an interesting point about points of reference and perhaps, about very wide ranges of interest. They’d need to be very varied in order to generate such vast and all-encompassing confusion.

The “young” man was confused about the world around him: he wondered how so much natural abundance could be allocated in a way that so many were deprived of access; he wondered how people could be so cruel and uncaring for their fellows; he wondered how people could be so easily fooled, especially through self-induced delusions; he wondered how nature endured so much torture and humiliation; and, he wondered about himself: who he was, what it was he really wanted, was he a good or a bad person, was he a victim or a victimizer; a lot of the time he speculated on what the future held. That speculation kept him somewhat sane as being essentially positive (although one might wonder how or why) he retained a very strong strain of hope.

He loved stars but that was one thing not very readily available in the night sky in the city where he lived, but he remembered them vividly from a childhood far away, although, of course, those starts would have seemed different from his current perspective (one might wonder at current perspectives in a once upon a time setting). He loved colors too and marveled at the great gift that made them possible, a gift that almost made it possible to believe in a benevolent divinity. And he loved trees, especially in the amazing balanced chaos of their branches and leaves, something that came close to explaining chaos theory. And those things he loved where the heart of the hope he felt, despite having suffered rather terrible betrayals, and rather desperate disappointments, but that was because each low had been matched with a miraculous high, resulting in a strange balance, a balance so perfect that it kept him poised at the point of perfect indecision, which was why, in a swamp somewhere in some long forgotten bayou, there once walked a very confused young man.
© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2012; all rights reserved