The safe place (An original short story)

It is time to pay my quarterly taxes. For some reason, I can't make myself to open the drawer, look up the estimated amount, write a check and mail it. I wonder what's wrong with me: tiredness, fear, absence of will, greed? I wish some shrink could explain it to me.

Can't be greed. Because, if I don't mail my check in time I'll be penalized five to six hundred bucks - not such a small chunk of change. If I would find that much cash, I'd be happy. What if I lose it right out of my pocket? Ouch, baby, double ouch.

Lazy? Yes. Especially when it comes to doing this mundane stuff. If it was something fun – that'd be different... What would I want to do? Hmmm… Well, I would want perhaps to hide somewhere, maybe in a book, yes a fat one with torn pages. Or in a math problem… Yeah, a nice, hard one. One that would not require many calculations, but lots of thinking, lots of imagination, one that would blow the mind into oblivion.

Maybe get away somewhere, like to the end of the World - Alaska, Siberia, a wild forest with singing birds, the quiet sound of a stream and the smell of wild strawberries, the crackling of a campfire.

Often I daydream like this, without going anywhere specific, just hanging in limbo. I daydream like this when something needs to be done that I don't want to do, or when people are asking me questions I don't want to answer, or a realization that I don't want to face.

Looking at me people might think I am some "absent-minded" professor, off in my own little world, but really I'm just faking my way through life.

Why? Perhaps to avoid questions? Some questions I hate. "Where are you from? Oh really, my aunt/cousin/friend lives there as well. How about your wife? Oh really, which street was she born on?"

What the fuck do I care? You want to know what street was she born at - ask her!

I'm even more afraid to be pulled into a conversation where someone would tell me how profitable his business is, or how expensive his house, how talented his children, what prestigious private school they go to, and how his success measures up to some acquaintances of his. If I'm lucky he'd spice his conversation with the memories of how he used to fight, defending his honor when he was young, or how many girls he banged, and how he still could have any woman he wanted.

But I do my bluff for more than just that. I am afraid to be confronted by a person who really succeeded in his life, in the way that I wanted to succeed in mine. I am afraid for anyone to see through my failures, and rub them in.

It's not that I hadn't been hurt in my life. I don't need any extra help from some sadistic, successful bastard. And so I put on a front for everybody else, pretending to look inside myself so deeply that I don't even understand what's going on.

In effect, I life in a self-manufactured cycle, which brings me back time and again, to contemplating about my life, drowns me in all those could've, should've and would've. These floating ever-changing emulations are as much my safe place as I could possibly have.

By some reason, I never settled down, like all these people who laugh and drink lots of wine, vodka, and cognac in each other's honor and for each other's health, and who seems to have the leisure to spare. When I think of myself, I think of a Marathon runner, who still has many miles to go to the finish line, but who stops short of his goal, because he doesn't have any more energy to continue. And so, tired I sit at the roadside and see life passing me by.

The only thing that somehow connects me to life, is my work. When I work, my gears fit perfectly with gears of reality and I exist in this attachment. I don't consider myself as a big guru, but an artisan.

What I do is to find a path, the path from where I am, to where I need to be. This path is imagined and then brought to life by technical knowledge and common sense. The rest is diligence and tinkering.

Sometimes I don't understand why people need, what I know, or why they pay for me to do what I would do anyhow? And knowing people's nature, I don't tell them.

I don't understand those people, who only wet their beak in the problem and then keep on standing by your side, talking about their contribution to the solution and downgrade people, who either didn't understand or had a wrong opinion about it. As far as I am concerned, if the problem is resolved, don't sit in the cavity that each successful resolution makes in the fabric of the Universe, just move on to the next unresolved one. I have to handle many of them. I am the problem solver. They know – with me, the buck stops here. Work is my other safe place.

The paradox of this, however, is that I am only doing my work, just like I've done it for the past ten or twenty years. I didn't become any smarter or wiser, only older and just as vulnerable.

Vulnerable to the ever-unpredictable economy, terrorism, taxes, lawsuits, aches, pains and accidents. I always seem to sink and float, float and sink, like I did once in my childhood.

I was seven then. It was a hot summer time. I went with a group of school kids, to the river not knowing how to swim.

Carefully I went into the water until it reached up to my neck. At this moment a barge passed by. The waves generated by its passage were big enough to cover my head. I panicked, started making sporadic movements with my hands and feet. As a result, I moved further away from the shore to a deeper water.

I tried to scream, but as soon as I opened my mouth, water rushed in. The kids around me were laughing and screaming, not realizing that I was in trouble.

After several minutes of floundering, I got very tired. My hands and feet felt heavy and I started sinking. But as soon as my feet felt the silted bottom something in me didn't agree to die and giving my last remaining efforts I continued to move my feet and hands. My body went up and I was able to grab a gulp of air before I went to the bottom again.

I don't remember exactly how many times I was able to repeat that, but every time it became harder and harder to get up. Water got in my throat choking me and if help hadn't come soon, I wouldn't be here to write these lines.

But I was lucky. Someone saw my sporadic floundering efforts and screamed an alert. Suddenly, I felt a strong stiff hand grab me by the hair and neck and pull me up to the surface.

"He's the one who saved your life", they told me later as I lay on the shore wrapped in a towel.

I don't remember if I thanked him. I probably did. All I remember now is his strong, rough hands. "You better learn how to swim, man." He said seriously. "I won't be there for you every time you drown."

He turned out to be right, for this incident seemed to determine the pattern of my life. I either sink, losing strength and hope, or I touch the silted bottom with my toes, gather my strength and propel myself to the surface of the water. In neither case am I really capable of swimming? And I still wait for that strong hand to pull me from the dirty water and bring me to the shore - to the safe place.