Tails or Heads

Sadness is eternal but the armour of age and experience is a formidable defense. The worries get heavier but the back stronger.

The illusions and distractions no longer fool but the forgotten, the simple and endless that surrounds us becomes visible. The taken for granted. The grass, the rivers, lakes, mountains, the cows in the fields, the birds in the sky, they become the comfort. The knowledge that the world was and will be, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

And all that is sold as imperative, as oxygen of the body, but not the soul for there is no soul, is touched and its cheapness of material felt. The poor stitching, the fakeness that doesn’t match the price tag. Paid for with numbers that nobody understands anymore.

While someone, looking at the ground, with one hand in her purse looks for that coin of metal, of smell, of feeling, connecting with a personal physical moment. Thousands of numbers not felt but this one coin ever so real, ever so valuable. Made in a mint, by real people, real machines, and now in that lady‘s handbag, somewhere in there, lost between lipstick, a cigarette pack and other details that make up a woman’s purse.

And a handbag would make for even bigger world to explore, yet it remains a personal but physical world. In that moment you wish a good morning and receive a half frustrated smile for where is that coin. There is a problem to be solved. A deeply human experience, which is to solve problems. Often many small ones and at times big ones.

And yet this world of glass that is called progress removes all problems and sells it as peace of mind, as the ultimate luxury and unknowingly replaces it with unsatisfying problems. Ones that give nothing, no satisfaction, no accomplishment once solved.

And there I stand longing for that feeling, that metal between my fingers, that smell when I raise my fingers to my nostrils, that frustration of struggling to read the little letters even as I put on my glasses. As I stroke the raised imagery and letters. Tails or heads, all emotion coming at me like a storm, all these childhood memories. Fair, cheating, deceptive but still a real coin.

A better world they sell devoid of all human experience. The lie that we are simple minded, like grazing cows in the fields, but even the cows look up at you and wonder. And what wonders, worries, and what worries, feels, and what feels, longs and what longs, knows.