My Mother Said There’d be Days Like This.

My Mother Said There’d be Days Like This.

How is it that life always seems to pan out the way our parents say it will? ‘Don’t do that, this will happen’; ‘don’t walk down that road, that will be the consequence’ Oh, how right they were! ‘Oh son, how dull life can be! How tedious and horrible. How life can beat you with a stick and subdue your will to live, to persist, and to endure.’

Sitting on my mother’s lap, all innocent and benevolent, I remember the words, ‘Son, love whole-heartedly. Forgive and forget. Life is what you make of it’ Funny that, I think as I look at the world around me; a world where undeserving boys have been given authority in an environment that’s completely insignificant in the real world. A world where making little boys cry is deemed masculine and warrants respect; a world that seems to be clouded with necromantic ideals, soulless goals, egotistical arguments and short-sighted values. And by some unexplainable occurrence, these people are the ones rewarded, admired, respected for their shallow endeavours.

‘Life’s not fair my darling; the sooner you realize that the better…’ I remember acknowledging those words and thinking, not I! I will eternalize a person with infallible spirit, never-ending patience and, through it all, get what I deserve. But yet, as I sit here, defeated by the obstacles around me, like a soldier gasping for his last breath, while clutching a blood-damped wound somewhere on his body, acknowledging the presence of his dead or dying comrades nearby, I am filled with the same helpless emotion, the emotion that fills one’s soul with doubt and cynicism; that defeats one’s spirit and pleads with every fibre in your being to do nothing but curl up, and succumb. Succumb to the wall of emotio...

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...ets. Their individual calls give the world some perspective; the cricket; his call incessant and diegetic; the cicada, his call more of a testimony to the fact that he is free to make as much noise as he pleases, for he feels no threat of predators; the thrush, with a call so divine that one cannot help but smile. And yet, through all this stimulus, my senses are heightened to the rising smell of freshly-fallen rain. A smell that is so fresh and tender, so clean to the nostrils.

‘Ahh, but my son, there shall be good days and they shall be bad days, but the secret lies with you; you decide which type your days will be and the latter will follow’ And, as I look out my now dampened window, the birds seem to agree as their chorus seems to climax in a cacophony of sounds paying tribute to Atlas himself.

My mother said there’d be days like this, oh how right she was.