{Pulled over at the roadside, waiting for another friend to come with tidings of help, water and relief from the introspective pit-stop he'd coasted into}
He'd noticed the temperature gauge of his poorly kept 1993 Toyota Vienta creep up half an hour earlier, and had left the rush hour traffic for the hard shoulder immediately. Only fifteen minutes of cursing and despondence had passed before Bowen had fortuitously happened upon his dire situation. One hopes they can rely on the kindness of strangers in a situation as inconveniencing as this one, for in the 'grand scheme of things', that's all it is. An inconvenience. However, one rarely can. They'll always try to suppress those fleeting hopes that a friend or acquaintance might find them because an inconvenience as stunting to a days progress as this one always feels far more weighty than it actually is. When that friend does turn up out of the haze of the alien highway, it's on a breeze so sweet to breathe you're almost happy to be there.
Nathan used the little Bowen had to offer with a gratitude seldom felt in the everyday. The phone had felt like a prayer with a guarantee, the simple telephone conversation with Kale – another generous friend who lived nearby – like the first drops of water to a parched man's throat. But in this case it was water for the cars parched engine Kale had agreed to bring in the next hour or so.
Was he really that negligent? Were mundane tasks of vehicular upkeep really that much of a stretch for him? These questions played on his conscience like fingers on an unmaintained violin.
It was only now he took the time to realise and reflect upon how buffeted and blown by the winds of fate his passage through life had been. Fate was always one of the many things he refused to believe in but he now found its attention grabbing efforts to be more difficult to ignore than ever before. A firm believer in the power of the self and the propensity of one's own determination to shape his path however they may want will never give fate's claims to causation praise unless it deals them a bad hand. Then they'll curse their luck and question their direction and drive with a contempt to match any of the innocent victims of circumstance and judicial sentencing unfairly rotting in gaols the world over.
Cars charge by, blind as red-sighted elephants stampeding in flight from a pack of hungry lions. It's abnormal, the inhumanity one experiences when they're stuck at the side of a highway. So much life driving such powerful machines, the capacity to do so much damage but all they want is to go, go, go. One falls off and the rest will keep on. A symptomatic by-passing of nonchalant power wielders, taking only brief notice of the one who for all they know has been sacrificed to the wallet of the roadside services.
The mind wanders like an Ibex, up and down sheer cliffs of doubt and vulnerability in the face of a standstill. The embarrassment leaves you nothing but slivers of hope. Luckily he'd made his call. Luckily he had Liz and Kale.
He is a friend indeed, or can at least claim to be so, with all the evidence given and in light of the age old proverb hypothesising that to be the aforementioned, one must be in need.
At the roadside today, need defines his every movement and want his every action. But of course, in those ways poetically relative ways, the reaction is warm and incites
No comments:
Post a Comment