Tuesday, March 14, 2006

It’s a dirty life

The homeless man is walking around the smoking corner of a downtown tall building, full of smokers. Nobody cares what he’s doing, or they pretend to. He bends over, collects all the bottoms of cigarettes. I see him doing the same thing almost everyday. The first time I saw that I felt bad, because when I step on my cigarette to put it out, it's like I’m stepping on someone’s mouth. I wonder if I should quit, stepping or smoking either one.
The door and the walls

Last night I started a course in university to upgrade myself for next upcoming promotion. It turns out this course is in the same building as the other certificate course I took five years ago. Back then my marriage had already fell apart and my ex and I had decided to split. It was a difficult time for me. I was taking an expensive, difficult and very intense course – five weeks long course - while I was dealing with my personal life – oh wait! It’s not over yet – I received a phone call from one of my colleagues, most of us have been given a 6 months notice for a mass layoff. It was rough and harsh. Everything! I would wake up every morning with this heart squeezing, soul crushing pain, I would just survive ‘till the end of the day, I’d get out of the campus building to get drunk and forget the pain, but I wasn’t forgetting a bit of it, I would just cry inside and go to bed with a more fucked up mind and carry on the same routine next morning. At the end, I failed the course, went back to work and saw my termination notice. I went insane and did crazy stuff which is another story and irrelevant. Last night when I walked through the same door and hallway, I was so depressed, the whole building refreshed the bad memories. I paused there for a second, tried to convince myself to go home and forget about course. I ended up going to the class.

Places, buildings, smells and many other objects; if we have a bad memory associated with them, they’ll haunt us forever. It seems we have two sets of memories, one in our brains one in our hearts. The one in my heart is always black and white. Either good memory or bad memory. Nothing in between.