Five Past Twelve

“Peace and order, order and peace. That’s what makes the world go round. If someone breaks the harmony, they are a menace to society. These menaces can be writers, painters, sculptors, teachers, or anyone who ever looked around and didn’t see some man-made utopia. Why do we have to fall in line? Can’t we see the world for what it is, without being a cynic?”

He stopped speaking for about a minute and stared blankly towards the front of the Church.

“We had paradise, Jack, a complete and untouched paradise, and we threw it all away. We threw it all away for nothing. For concrete, skyscrapers, cement, condos, country clubs, freeways and high rises. Paradise lost. How stupid we are, people wanting to colonize on Mars instead of fixing what we have now. Imagine that, Jack. Colonizing a new planet and eventually squeezing it dry and then eventually running out of planets. We’ll have to find wormholes to new universes to find new planets until there is nothing left. No world, no planets, no universe, and no home.”

“Does this keep you up at night? We have been going down this route for a very long time. There is too much momentum to divert the course,” I said to him as realism hauntingly filled the church.

“This campus and these people just kill me.” I said as I lit another cigarette.  The priest didn’t even flinch as the smoke floated in between us.

“You’ll learn soon enough that people are empires unto themselves, Jack.  We rise, we sustain as best we can through good times and hardships and eventually we all fall."

We sat there only a few feet apart, but our minds had finally fallen into sync. Even though we were feeling the same way, I was content with allowing the feeling to simply take over and drown me. The priest looked despondent and withdrawn. I am sure he had these realizations in the ‘70’s, but now he was drained of any agency he once had. Sara must have taken it with her to the grave.

“So what the hell are you going to do now?”

“Collect some government cheques. Maybe I’ll even write a little. If not, I’ll just read a lot. I haven’t touched a lot of great writers in a long time. I’ll figure it out. I’m an old man, so maybe the world won’t expect much from me anymore,” said the priest as he straightened out his back and finally looked at me. He appeared less upset than when I first entered his place of work. He stared at my face for a few stretched out moments; moments that I hoped wouldn’t end because I realized our time together was going to end very soon. I could not picture what my second year at college would have been like without him, or if another priest was stationed here. This man who bestowed the campus with his grace was not an idealistic man nor was he a fundamentalist; he was just a man in priest’s clothing. A sheep in wolf’s clothing. However you cut it, he was my friend.

“You’ll learn to accept this place, Jack, and one day your kids will go through the same thing when they are in college. It is completely natural.”

“I don’t know if I can ever get used to this place. Eventually something has to give. Four years in this place isn’t going to work for me. I can just drop out.”

“You’ll be homeless.”

“I’ll be happy.”

“It’s not how things work.”

The priest was torn between giving me the advice he felt he had to, and what he really believed was right. If I dropped out of college, my future was going to be limited, but, if I stayed in school, I would become one of them. A double edged sword dangled between me and both paths that I could have travelled.