***The Rebirth of P 2nd Excerpt

The_Scary_Man

Here is another excerpt from my story, a little further on. Comments appreciated.

P sat on the bench outside the office block where the recruitment company had their offices. He was tired, this was his third interview and while they all seemed to be impressed by his enthusiasm his downfall came with his lack of professional training in the area. He hung his head and stared at the ground. With his knock backs had come the inevitable seeds of doubt, seeds he couldn’t allow to take root.

Had his big decision really made that big an impact on his life? He was now jobless and he wasn’t having any great success in acquiring the job he wanted either, he was probably worse off now than he ever was, but something drove him on. He had to go forward with this, it was going to work, he felt that more strongly than he had ever felt anything in his life. Despite the knock backs and his growing sense of doubt he still felt more in control of his life than he ever had before, he felt empowered in a very real way.

He thought of a quote from Nietzsche that he had read and had stuck in his mind because he didn’t really understand the logic of it; ‘If we possess the why of life we can put up with almost any how’. Now he understood it though. He had found meaning and direction, he had found a reason to live on this adventure and that was worth more to him than money or success ever could but he still hadn’t pinned down his why. He lifted his head, looked around and this conviction burrowed even further into the fabric of his psyche.

He looked at the people as they passed, really looked. He had not done this in a long time. He stared at their faces and tried to imagine their lives. Were they happy? How many understood the why of their lives? Consciously or unconsciously were they aware of their reason for living or were they just plodding through life trying to avoid the puddles as up until recently he had been?

He watched a man bend down to pick up his little daughter and hold her close to his chest. He pulled his head back to be able to look in her face while still holding her close; he smiled and said something to her. She laughed out loud and buried her little face in his chest. The look on the father’s face cast an aura joy mixed with deep contentment. He held his why in his arms and more importantly he knew it. He fast tracked their lives forward 15 years and imagined the scenario then; the girl walks in with an outfit on that leaves nothing to the imagination. The father sees her and mourns her loss of innocence, he is pained by the fact that she is so grown up already and is expressing her sexuality. His daughter has grown up and no longer needs him in the way she did as a child, the over-powering love that had protected and nurtured her through her childhood has now come to be like a strait jacket frustrating her attempts to form her own identity. So he lets go, he allows her her freedom to choose how to live her life because he loves her, but he will never forsake her, he cannot, she is his why and always will be.

He turned his attention to a businessman, very well turned out in an expensive suit, he was talking on his mobile phone gesticulating and speaking loudly and fairly aggressively to the person on the other end. P imagined this man’s why was more materialistic than the father’s, maybe it was his business, the power his position his gave him or maybe it was being able to afford the finer things in life. Nonetheless the fact that his why was material and not spiritual or emotional didn’t detract from its validity because it’s value could only be measured by him and in terms of his own perspective on life. What mattered was not what it was but the fact that it gave him a sense of purpose, a goal to strive for.

As he watched these people a strange realization dawned on him, he felt a connection with these strangers as he looked in their faces. An intangible almost ethereal bond that came with trying to puzzle out the things that made them tick. Even the knowledge that his imagined life scenarios and backgrounds were entirely fictitious didn’t dull the sense of being connected, of belonging. He wondered at how he had never felt this before.
Before now he had never looked at people in this way. When he walked through town he just kept his head down barely noticing the other figures as they passed him on the street, he didn’t care whether or not their lives had meaning or where they called home. He didn’t care because there was no angle in it for him; he had enough to worry about with his own problems without trying to work out what other people’s were.

P had always felt somewhat detached from life around him as if he was ‘in’ it but not ‘of’ it but now he felt as though he was back, part again of humanity. He had fought his way out of the purgatory he had been trapped in and made his way back to the world of man. No matter what happened he had to carry on with this. He couldn’t even contemplate slipping back into the mockery of a life he had been leading before. He had to continue until he found his why, if he did that then he would be ok.