THE CEASEFIRE OF YOUR WINDED NEIGHBORS

This essay is a reflection on non-existence of a pure friendship without hate or anger. The movies you may see before or after reading this reflection are:

Gone with the Wind (1939, USA), Three Colors: Red (1994, France/Poland), and Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024,USA).

Here are some thoughts of life that linger as I finish a film or a book, as I remember devouring movies back in 1990s, when I was in my twenties. I have watched movies the way I read the person, the character or the persona. And there is also almost always a reminder of a book I have read. I watch life at times like in a school, while being amid other lives being students, and a somewhat-classroom was that old theater with its seats for those to suspend themselves before returning to other realness of the world.

. . .

Madeleine is beautiful, and looks like a joy to bake, for so many people, sweets for weddings and for retiring in the den with a book, a slow film or with a loved one. And then I stop, to pause, to nap, reflect or recant.

To be ethical doesn’t feel ‘good’ in the same way that doing the deed feels good.

It isn’t easy trying to do good from now to when you are wrinkly. And it isn’t easy to gauge that perfect moment in life when the shields are at the right angle for you to be protected.

And I don’t think it feels sweet to be at peace with another ‘country’ or ‘race’ or culture. It feels calm; sweetness is right after a threshold is reached and one exhales with a friend or love.

What are tweets or messages you would like to mentioned, assingly, that you would not have dared to type decades ago--- which a teacher or friend may or may not assist you to truly tweet at a later time?

There is then a sense that life as nourishment (other than by sweets) is felt at the right mellow song—until it is gone or even still, when the tune lingers between mind and wind. There are people at the back of a classroom or at the back of a theater whom some people in the front will never meet, and never know that she dances in a cute way; or that he strums a guitar like life was perfect.

There is a writer and viewer among you who will later prefer to be a critic, maybe because your fingers tire easily, but mainly because to confront from far away and at a stranger feels different with ease.

There are patterns in my life that I realize fit well when I look at someone. And I also then realize that I have my own rules when it comes to aesthetics I never knew I had until the rule of pretty is almost-broken.

I have read enough textings or tweeting that I can conclude that I cannot tell a poor person tweeting from a rich person tweeting, most of the time.

I wish at times that I can have something similar to a recipe in life that I can share with you so you can pick a meadow or a mountain and start my recipe for life.

You would think that after writing this as a chapter or as a review that I would be happy, perfectly where I am breathing easier that I have met enough loves… without a heavy heart.

But there are writers because our emotions have… yet to stop. There is always another moment and there is always another person…to meet and trigger another emotion I haven’t felt since last I looked at love or life. But based on what I see in the news, a historical kinship with a neighbor does not stop a war or the memories of a war by a great great grand kin.

I write because I like to give messages to you, you reader. I write within the first paper and the last paper, like this was formalized, and you, the reader, new in your criticism, I hope will self-contain with me. You might battle with some ideas and turn of phrases but there is no war between, believe. And as such, there is no need for us to be in a ceasefire of insight and possible epiphany.

I can never know who you are, or when you will do this kind of reading. I don’t know when I can meet you watcher or reader, and realize that it should not be you reading me; or there is that time when I can look at you and everything in my heart, in my body, says that all my rules in life I can let go so long as it is you reading me—to a sequel of life, to a series of lives, or into one of our eventual pitch black-ness.

There must be a message I give myself overtime; it says this and not that, or here and not there. And without realizing it, I have rules and I can overrule with my rules, and I can never mind any single one of them just to be with You.

And I can’t tell who you are, which one of you, a neighbor, is poor in heart or richer and tired, already, for whom no other love has room.

There is, I suppose, always that secret section in your mind, not even all the loves in your life has been, and I wonder if you, the reader, can place me there, me in the many layer of hues and tones that are you—you, among silly or selfless shelf to myself.

I feel this is best done in your Fall. So place me, when you are comfortable, in an Autumn of your choice.

If it is only me in there, in you, then I can, when I can, place my special own ♪ to linger in you.

One note of tone or tune-- I can give that, slowly. And another note for you-- all clicking and tapping and toning for your whole of temperament.

I can take a madeleine, if I may, with a book ahead of me, and try not to crumble my madeleines.

If my book or my choice of movie is old along with old writings or scribbles from older readers of the past, then I let my crumble join all the lost readers who likely have never met the writer.

And with that, here lies the heavy heart between the sweetness of a reader who allows the writer to be taken on a travel which you might pause or cease. With your reading me, I still can’t look at you because I am occupied with holding you to a scene and guiding your torso to face the stage I was on.

Maybe I can’t look at you as you the writer, and me as viewer, because you expect me not to lose our way first, before losing you altogether.

So having said all these, I am letting you know now that I am a man and that I’d like you to feel this one unlike any man you have met, because I am someone who is done --- now that you are one reader unlike any reader I think of by my cushion or by my cursive.

If I was screenwriter, I must have thought of you already when I met someone like you in mind; and there is no heavy heart, honestly when I part ways with the other(s). There have been few, very few.

And here you are still, located in my typing and texting some more, in an account of you I see as my fingers tap on you.

If my presence involved the birds, you would hear me when a flock bursts into their flight away, and I will be the one to pass by as a quote of me, as you frankly read me by.

As a writer, I have to end these notes soon. Maybe it’s not quiet enough where you are, and you make me, the director or writer, quieter than you should.

It is alright, I can say; you can make me loud when you read me or watch me; just maybe you’ll hear me say those four letters I want to give to you.

If you’d like, you can think of me, just as a man amusing you, my character-- by a garden, by a twisting vine or bean to laugh at.

If you’d like, you can think of me by your shelves, with Karamazov or Karamzin, Liza or properly in bed, beyond acquaintance or kin.

And here we are at the end, and I know you don’t need me to say the word, the four letters I’d like for you to give to me, like we are younger in time…

…just that it was sweet to be with you, watcher, that there is nothing else in life like madeleines with you.

L. A.

Peliplat.com

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