The reality is that I made it to the train station without rushing, and with five minutes to go. The reality is that it is snowing again, the city is again sleeping under a slowly thickening white blanket. The reality is that the morning is repeating again, and repeating the same sensation of tranquility with this white blanket that covers everything, including the rottenness of the previous layers of blankets. The reality is that I walked past the big and small mountains of gray ice balls piled up under a fresh sprinkling of its brothers, as if the dead is being reminded of its former glories as the living.
But wait, that's not reality. That's just my imagination of ice being sentient beings, with sentiments of longing, regretting, remembering. The reality is that I walked down the stairs to the tunnel in order to go to the train, without running, unlike the previous many times. I walked past the downstairs Dunkin' Donuts (there's another one in the main hall). And in the tunnel there were buckets lain down to catch whatever leak was coming down from the ceilings of the tunnel directly below train tracks there were accumulating snow. And passing by these little buckets were also other people rushing to catch this New York bound train that would take them to their first destination in about two hours.
And during those two hours, reality would continue to unravel itself to us. I have written many times about admiring the snow-covered landscape in the morning, its beauty, tranquility, and most relevant to my current new life, its simplicity. I don't think I have ever ridden in the morning while it was still snowing. It was as if we had the same picture as from those previous entries but now, with a gigantic Photoshop program, we increased the whiteness overall. It is also more peaceful because when it snows, people don't go out much, even though it is still a working day. And the train itself isn't as crowded as usual.
I had the past visit me this morning. My body, my mind, somehow, realizing it was still snowing, unconsciously (can the mind actively unconsciously do something?) thought of ways to delay my start of work. A voice, very faint but apparently the commander-in-chief of this attempted mutiny, asked if anyone would really be going to work in this most seemingly "blizzard". Maybe the train didn't even work, or was delayed. Maybe they are letting people go to work late, or not at all. And even if none of this was true, including calling it a "blizzard", maybe I "deserved" to take the train at the closer station that would get me in later; after all, that was what I was taking in the beginning, and they would understand since I was a commuter.
But the reality was that despite having lost time to check on the Internet to show that nothing of that voice was true, I walked without hurry to the main train station and got on the train with many minutes to spare. I even had a quick breakfast and thought about the things I needed to buy this weekend. Maybe reality is showing me that after nearly three weeks of this so-called new life, I have changed in the way I wanted.
Reality is just one of the sides of the yin-yang. While the other side sometimes tries (and sometimes succeeds) to get me in trouble, causes retrogress, it often is the motivation for joy. Imagination: that's always been a cornerstone of my life, my will to live, even if that will was misguided. It is the brother, if not simply a different manifestation, of passion. Where the gears of imagination automatically moves the dynamo of passion erupts.
Well, not always erupting, but you can see the difference. Yesterday I witnessed a great example of how imagination works in my life. I was at a meeting that directly involved me. It was not a boring meeting; it was motivating; I was excited. It involved a brief overview of this year's goals. The reality was a nicely lit conference room, with a view of the edifice of competition and the Long Island sound beyond the highway in front of us. It was a clear blue day. I had been programming the whole day and was thankful for the meeting to get my eyes away from the computer screen. Like I said, I wasn't bored. I wasn't engrossed by it since all I was doing was listening and ingesting the information. But I wasn't falling asleep as I had been in nearly all the meetings in my previous work.
But then I found myself in a different world. I found myself being a writer, writing about something involving the building, the highway, the Sound beyond. The plot, the characters, the upheavals of emotions were all slowly crystalizing as my trainer was discussing how important our goal was to the objectives of the group we worked for. And he became part of this story. This man who spends his only spare, personal moments looking at golf courses, his, I assume, only passion, whose wife works a few floors up, and who, as I saw sitting so close to him, has grown weary. His face was less shaven, more wrinkly; he was scratching himself while working; his eyes tired. Winter? No time to really take care of himself? I don't know. He was in my brief imagination of a story that I would write.
And I thought about Norma. I don't know why "Norma"; I've never met a Norma, but perhaps I wanted someone normal in my life. Not sure what I meant by "to be in my life". I imagined she was an old woman sitting in the kitchen of an apartment, with a broken glass a few feet away from her. And a young man, was it me?, was making his daily visit. He would comment that she had broken another glass, to which she showed no regret, blaming only the gravity of time on her frail senses. And it was using this daily visit as a vehicle to the stories I wanted to tell, about her past, about her regrets, her experiences that at her old age apparently had no effect on her, therefore, have degenerated to merely raisins of memories. She would talk about missed opportunities, failed struggles, and the overall crushing weight of life that somehow still allowed her to live on. Maybe this colleague of mine served as a character in one of those raisins. The young man, on the other hand, had only the same complaint all the time; it was about some girl, always, and his bad luck with women. The old lady would always listen, managing to put away the weights in her heart, and never failed at the end to tell him everything would be fine, without giving him some ranting advice that people usually did for really their own benefit. This was the deep reason, known to the young man or not, for which he always came to visit and to listen to the never ending saga that surprisingly had a different flavor and twist each time.
My imagination ended there. I caught myself being distracted from the meeting. I caught myself imagining based, actually, in reality. Although I admit that the food poisoning was quite a normal thing for a lot of people, especially if you count those in the developing countries, I take every opportunity to explore my emotions, often exaggerating them. So that night, those 24 hours, were tough, and the loneliness during that struggle, especially at the cliff of this new experience of self-induced vomiting, helped me conjure up this old woman, who would embody all the bitterness formed in and precious opportunities lost between me and the people I have met and parted. Imagination and reality, can't be separated. I am happy with reality, these days, minus the same struggle that the imaginary young man has. I am happy to see even the three buckets trying to catch leaked in snowmelt from the train tracks. The snow has stopped and the sky is turning to this beautiful light blue as the sun melts away the icy clouds. I like this reality. But to take reality one step further, my heart bounces up and down more through the dynamo of imagination. Imagination is a natural part of me, and what drives me crazy about writing, even the sentimental poems, and about photography and tango, which I should write about another time. And the reality, a step back now, is that things are good, very good. I get to have a beautiful reality to live in while letting my imagination materialize in it, even if it isn't my profession. And as lonesome the road of living in this reality is, so far, I am happy I have more than just golfing to motivate me to live.
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