Confetti

Confetti There is an ancient Irish legend I heard as a boy. The story goes that God created mankind and angels. Men wandered the earth and angels the heavens. Both man and angel were alone. Seeing this God broke man’s heart in two and gave half to woman. He cut the human heart in two so that together they might solve their loneliness. But he left the angels hearts intact…unbroken. Only a broken heart can ever hope to become full. So these creatures remained, small and empty, locked up in the eternity of themselves. They knew nothing of what it is to flee into someone else eyes or offer shelter in your own. To become larger than your own want. Most quietly endured that existence.But there was one kind that watched humanity from afar, then drawn to it came to dwell among the living. This kind of angel fell in love with humanity. But there was, as always, a price. Beneath the human beauty,intoxicating and irresistible,was the acid of living. Its irrevocable flaws. Its sorrow, its inhumanity and sinfulness. God warned them. He said,"Sorrow and beauty are wed.And the price of seeing is that some things can never be unseen. So if you remain among mankind it's acid will eventually blind you." Some listened. Others drawn to the wonder of life did not. Irish legends are almost always dark. Happily ever after was invented much later in America. Slowly these angels, forced to witness the thing surrounding what they craved, were blinded. Years ago I used to live near a home for the blind in New York. Most mornings I would watch them, climb on a bus, feeling their way along the sidewalks that took them to a local factory that made clocks. The owner had a daughter that had inherited some eye disease and gone blind. He decided to hire only the sightless. Time is invisible. We can’t see or smell it. We cannot touch or hold it. We can only feel it, crawling past. Relentlessly sweeping us forward. But the people from the home, blind to the world, seemed to feel it more intensely, as though the darkness exposed it to them. Only darkness allowed them to see it, and tame it, and force it into a shape we could understand. And seeing what no one else could they were able to manufacture time's speedometers, so that we sighted could see what we can only feel rushing by. Each year as winter approaches there is a blind man that that sells pencils in Time Square. Each day he stands outside the tower where they drop the ball each New Years Eve. There is a slot on 42 St. side of the building. Passersby are encouraged to write one line about the dreams that did not come to be that year. Strangers buy a pencil from the blind man and scrawl their disappointments on a slip of paper and drop them into the slot. They write about loneliness or grief and heartbreak. These anonymous slips carry small confessions, worries about jobs lost and rent overdue, about doctors diagnoses and disease. About children losing their way. About divorce and addiction. About love lost and love unfound. They are scrawled by the hundred each day,then handed to the blind man. He runs his hand over each, brings each close to his eyes to feel the weight, then drops each thru the slot. Times Square is no place to be on New Years. Take it from me. It's full of amateur drunks, that are either fighting, bleeding or puking. It's shoulder to shoulder with pickpockets that think of that night as their Black Friday. At the end of each December the slips are bundled together then fed into a shredder. The bales are dragged to top of the spire. Then at midnight, that moment when Time is nearly visible, all the shredded dreams are released. As confetti. We who cannot see Time will pretend that the past can be chained to a calendar. A ball will drop, a blind man will ring his bell and the cold night air will fill with shredded dreams. We cheer the broken hearts written on paper and consigned finally to the wind. We kiss strangers and swear once again that unhappiness can be collected and torn from where it hides in the human heart, cut up and rained down in celebration, to finally be swept up and forgotten. And a blind man with pencils and a bell will wait among the mob, drawn once again to the beauty of human hope, its disappointments once more raining down all around him. He will smile at the confetti of shredded grief. At the feeling of being almost human. Then he will stumble into a subway, feel his way across the river to a clock factory where he will, along with the other blind angels, take hold of invisible Time and convince it to give up its true shape. A circle. And far from that place I will watch the confetti, feel the pull of invisible Time and close my eyes. Sometimes I dream that I am not who I think I am. That I am a different creature, disguised in this skin. Some days I fear my vision is darkening even as my sight is aflame. Some nights I think I will go blind from it all. WLM