CYRUS PAVEL

I like the way my life has shaped itself to be. Sure, from time to time I miss old acquaintances and old times. I’m still learning to let go of the past and simply smile about it if others bring it up. 

I guess I just see small short stories in friends gone by. Two strangers that once had a conversation at the checkout line of some department store. 

That’s what everyday is. It’s a story, waiting to be told. A story to hear, or read. A story to be forgotten by the next story that gets told right after. 

I can’t tell what’s wrong with people anymore. I think I have just stopped caring. A tiny circle will make everything else around it irrelevant to the naked eye. You cannot get the thread through the needle if you can’t see where the hole is. 

Don’t mix your cigars in the same humidor together, but poison yourself with as much liquor as possible. Don’t cry over spilled milk, but toss some salt over your left shoulder. Don’t talk with your mouth full, but it’s ok to be full of shit if you’re running for office. 

Rules. 

Never date a friend’s ex, but fuck your friend if she’s hot. Never chug beer, but here, take this shot. 

Never hold hands in public, but kiss me on this corner and over there on that mountaintop.

Never catcall girls because it’s all sexist and what not. 

Don’t text and ex, but definitely write about him or her. Don’t wake up from good dreams, but go to sleep while you’re still awake. 

I don’t owe you anything, but maybe there are a few things that you need to hear. 

We were never friends. We were strangers that needed something from one another. I guess you needed someone you could call whenever there were things that you couldn’t tell your old friends and family about. Someone that you could remove weight from your shoulders to. And maybe I just needed someone to help me fuck the pain away because that’s what I do when I’m in pain. 

We didn’t know each other. We never did and we wouldn’t have. There were and will always be way too many things that we would have to keep to ourselves for that to work. 

In my head, we were total strangers that fucked. I didn’t care where you came from or who you were. I only cared about how you looked and how good your sex was. 

The truth is, once I started finding out more bits to you, the parts I didn’t like outweighed the ones I supported. 

Damn, I almost got caught up in The Matrix, again. “What exactly  is: The Matrix?”, you ask.

I think that today, I can better explain it. 

The Matrix is a series of events that occur, back-to-back, that make life feel: wonderful. The Matrix is when your conscience and subconscious mind believe that you have rolled dice for a higher power to intervene in your life, and won that dice game. Everything around you is perfect, and everything you have always wanted begins falling into place.

 But The Matrix is an illusion; a preprogrammed illusion for the purpose of making you a worker. Part of the mechanism that runs the wealth machine. You can never get to the top of that machine, but you touch it everyday. 

It’s when we stop caring about the only things that truly matter for chasing things that never have and never will. Not before this life, nor after. 

Whatever. The Matrix isn’t one thing, so it’s hard to explain, but I almost got caught up in it. Let’s say that it’s a way of living, and I want zero parts of it. 

I finally made the full commitment and transitions to the clouds. All my files and documents live there. Paranoid me has a full backup on nearly a Terabyte drive, but I am fully immersed into living in the cloud. Like anything else, it was a bit scary at first, but now that I know where everything is my workflow is back to normal. 

Not too shabby. 

The more I live the more I realize that people will waste your time for no good reason. The more of the world that I get to see and experience, the more I realize that there are no good reasons for nearly everything. 

You see a world full of dramatic cars and intense fabrics. I see illusions that you put a value on, but that can’t leave this earth the day that you do. Then what good are these: “things?”

As we walk on the coast, barefoot, I turn to you and ask what it is that you value the most. You tell me that you value love, and I look down at our feet and wonder if love, too, won’t follow us when we’re gone, either. 

I was excited for the adventure when we took off to LA last October. We took my favorite airline out there, but I was going to miss the best parts of Autumn. A tiny part of me was miserable. Autumn happens to be my favorite season. Well, Autumn in New York City, that is.

And then a funny thing happened. Autumn, followed us to LA. It was chillier than normal, and then we hit Florida for the New Year and that was colder than usual, too. 

After the New Year, we made a pit stop in NYC, and ran into Winter. Back in LA, Autumn was still around, and now, back in NYC, it feels like she has taken over for her sister, Primavera. 

I don’t mind it. I love me a perfect Fall at any time of the year. 

I ignore your messages because it’s much easier to forget. I don’t mean that to hurt you. It’s just that most of my time is spent on other things. 

‘Of course, these things are important’, I say. 

"To love forever is to live forever. Eternal life is coupled with Love. 

Why do we want to live forever?

Because we want to live another day with this person by our side. Because we want to keep going with someone who deserves our Love, and who knows how to love us as we think we deserved to be loved.”

I stopped seeing you in my dreams because Grey has taken up that space, now. 

I stopped needing you when I’m asleep because there’s nothing I need now. 

I stopped searching for you in random faces and stranger’s shoulders because I don’t have time to waste on things that weren’t meant to be. 

It doesn’t mean that I don’t love you, it just means that I have to continue to just be. 

I was talking to someone last night about perspective. How when two people are sitting and talking to one another, the things they hear coming from each other’s mouths are part of a much bigger scene. 

Picture this: 

You and I are sitting at a reclaimed wooden bar with a skylight above it that lets the sun come in from outside. The bartender asks us what we want to drink, and we give our orders. 

The scene that you see is so different than what I’m seeing because of positioning. You can see everything behind me, and I can see everything behind you. The angles we look at things from are different as well.  

We have a five minute conversation about why you think Trump shouldn’t win the nomination, and why I think the GOP shouldn’t flat out steal it. Then we stop. 

Think about us having wore a pair of Google glasses that recorded video of our perspectives, and then think about how different we experience the same exact scene, happening at the same exact time. 

Being aware of the perspective of others is a science to be mastered. 

I have to go to a baby shower today. In fact, it’s a gender-revel party (whatever the f*ck that is???). I don’t mind going because I love to see new people and talk about different things. I’m addicted to that kind of life. It’s why my mind gets restless in desolate places and small towns no one has ever heard of. 

Anyway, what I do hate is how people front like they’re happy for you and your pregnancy. I hate it because I know that people don’t give two fucks about it. Some may be genuinely happy that you are happy, but on the inside, they really don’t feel genuine happiness for what’s about to happen to your life. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I just feel that maybe we should redesign how people are supposed to act in certain situations. I mean, have you ever been to a wake just because someone you love thought it was the right thing to do? I have. I didn’t feel shit. I didn’t feel sadness or hurt. I felt very nonchalant about it all—like: ‘Oh well, that’s life’.

I feel like maybe we fucked up—humanity, in general. Like we got nearly everything wrong all these past decades and centuries, and maybe now that we have more access to information, we are scrambling to reverse the stupidities we set in motion. 

How different would the world look if we could go back and fix all of the wrongs? 

There’s one thing that’s never changed in my life. One constant when I look up at the night sky. It’s the stars. Their formations never change. Their positions never move. I’ve seen them lying naked in the grass, I’ve seen them on the shorelines of loneliness. They have been there while I’ve been driven in the back of cars, staring out the windows onto dark roads headed to someplace else. 

No matter where I have been, no matter where I have ended up, they have always just been. So when I look up at them and recognize them I instantly think: ‘home’. 

Whoever said that home needed to be a place on earth? 

It bothers me that I have no idea where I came from. That I have no idea where we are because I have no basis of where we all originated from. It bugs me to think that I just woke up here, and that I cannot remember anything before this. I guess it just annoys me to have no control, and to understand that we ultimately have zero control over our own fates. That even if we attempt to leave a mark behind, they ultimately become erased and withered away by the sands of time itself. 

You believe that time heals all wounds, right? 

What if where we originated from is somewhere out beyond the stars? Maybe that’s why the sun doesn’t shine at night, so that it could show us where we come from; a map to home. 

I stopped counting the stars when an old witch told me that if I ever achieved in counting them all, God would punish me by forcing me to count every grain of sand in the universe. I wonder if somewhere else, in some other galaxy, another little boy is attempting to count every grain of sand on his planet. I wonder if an old witch will tell him the opposite. 

Sara was in from NYC and she was headed over to Sorrento to spend the day with her. We both loved Sorrento, as it was the nearest town to where we lived that had mainstream luxury shopping, countless romantic restaurants, gorgeous hotels with views from above down to the dock, and dockside restaurants right on the water with music and lots of frosty beverages. 

I didn’t mind. I was looking forward to the time alone. It had been months since I’ve had any alone time, and I needed it. I was going crazy on the inside, but i had to pretend to be as strong as ever for her, so it was taking a toll on me. 

I think that’s what love really is. The sacrifices we make for others. Maybe that’s the one and only true measure for love that there is, and not how fast in bpms your heart races for someone else. 

I walked the winding road for hours. I stopped every few feet to look down at the ocean. Every few miles I’d see another house built on the side of a cliff, hanging over the ocean, and I’d picture what it would be like to live there. What waking up to the sea, and getting awoken by the sea must be like. 

I walked up the winding roads of Ravello and realized that once again I had miscalculated just how strenuous a walk would be. But maybe that’s why I miscalculated it, because had I done so I might have convinced myself to take a taxi instead. A taxi would have defeated the purpose of being with myself. 

Mindfulness, is something that we should all practice so much more of. Some of you have never even heard of mindfulness. That is a real tragedy, so if you haven’t heard of it then go on and look it up. 

I didn’t walk back that night. I stayed at the top of Ravello for a while just staring down at everything and then took a taxi back once it was pitch black outside. The last time I drove through Italy in the back of a cab at that hour was back in Naples, when we first arrived. Tuxes, cocktail dresses, a Vespa, champagne, pizza, loud music and a lot of kisses, back then...

Oh how times change. 

There’s no law that says that we can’t build an entirely new system of government that has never been built. There’s no law that says that we cannot take pieces and parts of these systems that did work, and combine them into one that excludes the parts and pieces that did not work. 

Capitalism, Democracy, Dictatorship, Socialism, Communism, the list goes on. No one says that we have to follow failed policies, sciences and still unproven theories.

Let’s make our own. We have the power and enough data to do so. 

I’ve lived in enough places to know where I want to be. I want a lake house. One where the winters are white, the  Fall is beige and dark brown, and where the Spring is yellow, pink, white and baby blue all day and night. 

I like the warmth of the summer, but she isn’t for me all year long. I need the cold air in my lungs. I need the cold air through my nostrils. Too much warmth makes the mind lazy, first. Soon after, the body and the soul follow, until the heart finds no need to continue. 

A lake house. That is where we will be. Montana, maybe? Just wait, and you shall see.