It’s
dark and I’ve walked carefully into the sleepy orange light of a little bar
called “Naked Lunch”. I look at the bar menu, enjoy the way my hands fall
gently to the bar’s counter, and ask for a glass of something labeled the house
white. The glass is iridescent, a white wine seemingly lit by a carefully
crafted bar ambiance.
I
finish my glass, walk back outside, and let the cool breeze slip through my
jacket and behind my ears. My cousin is on a hill that has been cut into to
make stairs. We stand there awhile; his friend has been picked up by his mom,
and we have time to kill before an Uber arrives or we decide to go home on
public transportation the way we came.
In
this waiting period, two guys that can’t be that far from my age set themselves
up in front of Naked Lunch, one of them holding a guitar gently like it’s
something soft, and the other pushing his hair out of his eyes, and setting
down an old hat to collect money. At first glance, I can only notice that across
from the guitarist is a girl and her two friends who can’t take their hands off
of each other. She sways and pushes her eyes right onto the guitarist,
generating an enthusiasm blended with a feeling of longing so deep I can feel
it myself.
He
ends his song and she claps quickly, then makes a show of putting several
dollars into the friend’s hat in support of the performance. She leaves with
her two friends and I start to feel a little uncomfortable; my cousin has gone
inside Naked Lunch for a glass of water, and I’m now the only one on the street
who has been present for the music and has not offered anything in support of a
young musician just out to make it in this world.
And
then he starts playing a song that I know. It’s old, it’s not a song I’ve heard
in a long time, and to be honest, his rendition leaves some of the best parts
of the music to the imagination. But in this moment, I don’t care about any of
that. I picture myself on this same street, but with Max. I picture how
different my life has been over the last six months, then I picture how
different my life has been simply in the last week.
And
finally, I realize something—this boy on the street corner in front of a bar
called Naked Lunch, with his dirty blonde hair, and his douchey-looking friend
with the hat, and his guitar, and his subpar voice, he really is no different
from me. He’s here, in this city, and he’s doing something brave, just sitting
on a street corner playing music that he clearly loves.
I
used to think that all I really needed from this life was sunlight that made my
skin glow orange and gold and pushed my eyes to feel green like a one dollar
bill. I used to think it would be enough to simply exist, waiting for people to
realize what good I’d be. I would have beautiful pictures in my imagination of elephants
and whales or a sky more full of stars than any picture I’d ever seen, and I
would close my eyes and believe wholeheartedly that the beauty of the world was
contained right there in my imagination, and if I pushed my mind to think of
things hard enough, they would appear right before me.
But
in this night, I realize that the beauty of dreams isn’t everlasting, at least,
not the way I used to think. What’s more beautiful than the total uniqueness of
reality? I’ve been to Africa now, and I’ve seen the way it looks when elephants
cross the horizon, and it doesn’t look anything like the pictures I’d created
based on episodes of Planet Earth, with time moving in slow motion and the moon
and stars rotating in a circle perceptible to the naked eye. The real earth
creates beauty that we can manipulate to look like traditional art, but at the
end of the day, what is more beautiful than the dirty fingernails strumming a
mediocre version of a song I used to listen to when I was fourteen? What is
more real than that, right?
Elephants
and whales are endangered, and it’s nothing within my imagination that prepared
me to look at the scarred old skin of an elephant with crooked tusks, gently
chewing on leaves while I watch from under a scratchy old blanket in the bed of
a safari jeep in the arresting cold of 5:00 in the morning. Life can be
beautiful, but I’ve begun to learn that it’s the scarred, intimate details that
matter the most to me. Those are the ones with a story to tell.
I
ended up giving a couple of dollars to the aspiring musician. It makes me feel
good to coexist in a city where people are showcasing their dreams so
trustingly.
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