ILLUSIONS

        As I sit, wrapped in my warm jacket, steeling myself against the coolness of the night, I hear the sirens of ambulances wheedle and honk as they transport another hapless soul to Boswell Hospital’s emergency room door. Yes, I see it clearly in my minds eye, for I have followed an ambulance or two and I have watched as they took my aging father, my aging mother, to the place they would spend some of the last days of their lives.

        I can easily imagine the EMT’s transferring their charges into the care of worn and weary doctors and nurses working the night shift. Doctors and nurses who have, in the words of T.S. Elliot, “known the voices dying with a dying fall beneath the music from a farther room…”

        And again, I think of Elliot’s words, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas…” for I see now that I am that beast, that scuttles beneath the murky waters of illusion, spurred along by storms of emotion I can neither track nor control.

        And where is it that I should go? And how should I decide or even understand the workings of life, and reality, and meaning? Who am I that life should even care, or that meaning should even connect itself to me? As for reality, well, that too seems to be as much an illusion as meaning and life itself. Ah, and how I have so deeply felt that there was a purpose to it all. Such is the power of illusion.

        At times like this, when the cold and darkness closes in, I know that I am alone, and that in that aloneness I am nothing but a ripple on the sea of time, a tick that emanates from the great clock of eternal strife, just another dust mote tossed and blown by the winds of change, signifying nothing at all.

        From deep within me there is the cry of a desperate child, crying for a mother that was never really there and will never come, will never suckle or nurture, just another illusion fostered by fairy tales of connectedness and love. Illusions, illusions all, generated by need, and desperation, seeking substance, seeking proof that existence is more than just desultory dreams brought about by the play of energies that vibrate through an endless continuum.

        And who am I that I should wish for connectedness and love? Who am I that I should hope to find meaning, consistency, constancy, or order? It exists, for sure, in the positive and negative flows of energy, in the particles and the atoms, and yet, it is as meaningless as the birth and the death of stars, as meaningless in the grand scheme of things as gravity and motion. It’s just the natural outcome of the interaction of physics and the physical. It doesn’t mean anything.

        And as I listen to the ambulances come and go, I know that there are others, like me, who long for that which is swiftly passing away, who grieve for that which seemed to be but never really was, who have hoped for that which can never be, and must, in the end, let go… of the illusion.

Kerry Dennis

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