Because of some ultra-mindfucky, nefarious human schemes and some unintentional collateral damage too, so much of the man-made world has become a devastating force to my freedom. I was involved closely with the value corrupt business described in a certain famous author’s famous essay ^1 (which if mentioned in paragraph and given such prominent space on the page would be the only thing you’ve read by now but is so infallible and brilliant on the subject it replaces pages of quivering explanation) which depicts the absurd twenty first century realized nightmare of a ‘cruise’. On a similar excursion to an overpopulated corral reef I watched an extremely obese women trample corral in my upper periphery while I hovered next to a rare sea turtle twelve feet diagnally below her. This is how I’ve come to feel for the majority of my life: I’m propelling myself away from the surface, immersed in a separate world with a life-force that wanders areas vaster than I can truthfully ascertain a mental image of.
In Bermuda my brother and I managed to get granted road access on mopeds after a brief and hilarious training session performed by a drunk man named Crock who would occasionally blurt out his opening line for tourists, “Welcome to Bermuda, here we drive on the left side of the Rudd” in true satire. So twenty four hours after dodging my overly alpha cousins and solemnly losing a hundred dollars at a black jack table that, if it were just a mere two hundred feet bellow itself, in the murky blue lost-ness of the ocean itself, would only earn a tinge more of a depressing atmosphere, I was helmetless, barely trained, turning a throttle on one of the three main roads on an island three hundred miles off the coast I spent all my life on, surrounded by a myriad of nature’s tropical amenities. Holy be any dangerous freedom tallied in youth unscathed. Sure, I was fearful. My younger brother was more confident. But when I got to my moments, and I was trusting the leaning of my body, and making much of the faces I saw, and giving all quiet ovation to the immaculate ocean on my side, and the crowding trees on each side, and the hilariously over-sized buses…
Since this is the world where all everyone does is try to kill me in the most roundabout way possible we needed to make it back to the boat by sundown for something or other. What we needed to be back on the boat for was the equivalent of Prom when we should have been way out in the midwest, wandering up to other people’s camp sites becoming subversives and vagabonds. We were scheduled to go back to the mall when we needed to go to the dusk covered shores. We were scheduled to be scheduled when we needed to have nothing at all specifically to do. This utter lack of a worthy purpose snowballs through our calendars. That night, we debated a down-right insubordinate early escapade back to shore, beginning around 5 am to make the hour and a half moped trip entirely from one end of the island to the other, from Royal Wharf to the early seventeenth century church St. Peter’s at the other end. While I had my brother on the line for it, a combination of my unhappiness and his concern with the social landscape of the boat sunk our pilgrimage the night before. When I realized it was done for, wandering around the boat with a drink around 11pm, planning my retreat to my cabin, I had the stark sensation of losing something I didn’t yet understand
So, here it was, I had my wings, briefly, the fucking wings of flyin’ down the left side of the rudd, and then before I knew it I was trapped again. It is the fodder of teen cinema to prove that the man who rode off fearful, but overcome by a creeping joy, is the same man later, when followed in upon by the heaviness of life. I wrote a poem on the upper deck about a ghostly figure who can be seen acting out my life in excellence. When I slept, he was up at the writing table. He was standing at St. Petersburg overlooking the far shore. I am hurling the courage upward in his name. I’m branding myself the apprentice of this esteemed ghost.
About the Author:
Chris Milea is the aspiring boyfriend of a local waitress. He lives on the lower east side of New York City with a couple of poets and is 24 years old.
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