Loving Epiphany

[Journeyman]

I couldn't figure out a quick and easy way to format it for the forum, so here's this.

http://alphafoley.home.comcast.net/LovingEpiphany.doc

[Eowyn_Vala]

wow, that was really good and really deep! At first I didn't think that it would end that way or that it would be so moving. You are very blunt and forward yet you manage to convey this sense of emotion that many cannot duplicate when trying to write beautifully and eloquently.

My roommate fallen_angel agrees with me too! She thought it was very deep.

[fallen_angel]

yes, indeed i did agree. she read it to me as i was standing on a chair prying blue sticky tac off the cieling tiles in our room. i actually almost fell off the chair while she read it because i forgot i was leaned over trying to jab at a peice. this is very good and i hope you write more.

[chavos]

interesting...the contrast of the beginning and end works very well. i might watch out for a little too much detail in the middle (mentioning names, etc...) since it separates the numb/alive dichotomy. thanks for sharing your work-i hope there's more to come.

[J.R.V.A.]

Wow, I finally read this. Good stuff, Thanks for sharing

[MacGnG]

Loving Epiphany
Troy Foley


The entirety of my focus is fixed on the repetitive rythm of my own heavy breathing, paying no mind to anything else going on in spite of occurences that i use to immerse my whole being in. Vibrating photons of red, green and blue around 400,000,000,000,000hz pounding the immortalized images of Peter North deploying his soldiers of evolutions all over Jenna Jameson's artificially enlarged mammary bodies against unblinking, unmoving glazed eyeballs. Vibrating molecules of atmospheric air bumping in sync at Peter's high-pitched 500hz all the way from the speakers to my ears. Vibrating motor on high at 50hz to the afferential sensory input of my penis, numbed. From one soulless synthetic transmitter to one soulless organic reciever, my mind is too busy on a single hz repetition originating from my lungs. I think I've had a brain fart, profound enough to be called an epiphany.

From before I even knew what it was, my long-standing goal has been to fuck someone. Me and the other guys, my so-called friends, would talk loads and loads of shit about all the different girls we wanted to fuck. I even formulated an argument once that whites, blacks, browns, reds, yellows, everyone was human because every race, every nation, maybe even every town had at least one woman who I would kill ten men if it meant I could fuck her, just once. It was an embarrasment being asked after any given summer or winter break whether I'd gotten laid yet. Not because I got any shit for not scoring, no. I felt an internal, homegrown sense of inadequacy for not living up to my own expectations.

"I would rather make love once than have sex a thousand times," someone once said to me. Ron Jeremy, eat your heart out. I blew it off then and there, gave it no more thought than I do to my own naval lint. Sprawled out in my broken down chair, listening intently to the panting of my own breath, I wonder about the difference between fucking and making love. That's about the point where it hits me.

"If you love someone, you don't want them to suffer. You want to take their sufferings on yourself." Emphathy is one of the lesser known human traits. Putting yourself in someone elses shoes so well that your toe contracts when you see someone stub their own. Your stomach clenches when you hear about their traumatic breakup with a lover. Your eyes well up when you watch them bawl over the loss of a parent.

It's not about playing make-believe, pretending to be someone you're not. Our abilitiy to be empathetic is most profound with our own children because we know that whatever our definition of human is, it's something they snuggle into like a glove. Love, empathy, is about more than the recognition of a fellow homo sapiens lineage as similar to your own, but rather feeling in your heart that the humanity and conscious awareness and emotion and passion... that a soul as real as ones own dwells and flourishes within a body not of ones own.

Jesus, son of God or not, loved all of human kind because he knew--he had faith in his heart--that every man, woman and child had the divine spark. There was no doubt in the whole of his being that all people of every race, creed and religion were as human as he. The dedication in Martin Luther King, in Ghandi, in Mother Theresa, all commited humanitarians, is possible because they haven't forgotten that every human, from Motambo the Bushman to Neil the Moonman, is everything that they themselves are but from a different view.

The Germans forgot that their Jewish brethren were human, and felt no empathy when killing them en masse. The Americans forgot that their African brethren were human, and felt only profit in enslaving them en masse.

Well I'm not going to forgot how much life, love, grief, pain, passion, drive, will, humanity is in the German Jews of the fourties or the Israeli Palestinians of the nineties. I'll always have love for the blacks in chains of old steel and chains of modern prejudice. I'm putting my feet right in the shoes of Northern Irish Catholics, South African Blacks, Indian Muslims and Pakistani Hindues.

Turning off the vibrator, putting my numbed self back in my pants, I shut off the TV as I bolt out of my room, my house, my yard, my living, breathing death and into a second chance. I drive around town, watching a thousand and one different me's living a different set of experiences and events and views and sunsets and newborns and funerals and comedies and tragedies. I don't see numbers or urine samples or statistics or demographics. I don't see people I want to fuck. I see diving sparks lighting up the horizon. I see soulmates I want to dance with to the end of time.

WOW! Troy, I thank you.

[Journeyman]

Thank you.

Side note, I actually remember reading that typo "diving" many months ago and I still dunno why I never exchanged g for e.