True Freedom -- Musing

 

"Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me" -Emma Lazarus.

I have long been a troubled soul. One tortured by natures unknown to even me, but yea i have tasted it. I have tasted what true freedom is, and how truly wonderful it is. We are often told what freedom is. freedom is when you get the keys to your first car, when you're handed a diploma from your college dean, or when your handed a hefty retirement payment from your now former employee. I argue, however, that none of that is freedom, none of it is true freedom. 

Tonight, on the eleventh of May I was given an experience unlike what life is to a child. I had spent the day driving my grandmother back to her home in Gulfport after a nice, but tiring, Mother's Day weekend. I had gotten home with the intention on taking my good friend Cory door dashing(delivering food to people for a modest payment) but had decided to wait until seven, as my brother needed the car to help his girlfriend move something-or-other. In that time I took my brother to the local drugstore to satisfy his cravings for snacks and the likes. We arrived home at seven, and nay there was nary a car in sight able be used for my exploits with my dear friend. Needless to say I was deeply upset, but I did what is the only thing one can do in a household such as mine --where the wrong words in the wrong tone is more then enough to suffer a loud and drawn-out sequence of reprimands-- and stayed quiet; unfortunately not quiet enough dodge a reminder that my anger is unjustified in the face of my fathers subconscious favoritism. So the issue effectively ended until my brother came home a full 45 minutes later then he was meant to, holding a Jersey Mike's sandwich and a simple unremorseful attitude. I left the moment I was able to.

You may now be wondering "Yeah, that sucks, but what does it has to do with freedom?" well allow me to skip the largely uninteresting details of my exploits with Cory until after I dropped him off at his home at ten O'clock. 

As I drove home in the pouring rain(so intense I had trouble finding the end of my lane and the start of the next one at times) the song "Sailor's Song" by Gigi Perez came on my playlist, a song very dear to me for reasons I will not specify here. As I listened to the harsh, nearly unmusical, strum of the guitar and Gigi's forever-echoing vocals, I felt a feeling well up in my chest. In that moment I was ready to surrender myself to the night, and allow myself to slip into a delirium where nothing mattered at all, but I had to drag myself back to the world to drive safely. 

Instead I rode to the makeshift levee access by my house(the hole in a long-collapsed fence of an abandoned house) and trudged up into the field before the levee. There I turned the music back on, and allowed myself to live like there was nothing else tomorrow. I sat on that levee for at least a half-hour, basking in what true freedom was. There, with the rain and wind blasting on my face, I let the world fade away. There I wasn't Aidan, the Fixer, the "Good" Child, the Responsible One, the Grandma Whisperer(A different grandmother then the one in Gulfport,) the Student, the Teenager, the Man. There I finally, for the first time in my life, felt exactly like I was where, who, and doing exactly what I wanted to be. It was something of a religious experience, being baptized in holy rain, washing yourself clean of the sins before you, letting yourself be born anew. I felt as though I was free of Shawshank prison, and basking in the rain of freedom. I felt the rats all scurry away to their dens of misery, and allow the real me to come out of hiding to frolic in the fields of my mind, under the old willow tree or my memories. 

Yet, all things must come to an end, and after possibly the tenth replay of a collection of "Sailor's Song," "Creep," "Iris," and "Heather" by Gigi Perez, Radiohead, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Conan Grey respectively, and a period of dancing, crying, and screaming,  I decided to slowly trudge back through the barren field to my awaiting car back in the light of the suburbs, back to the chains of society as it is needed to be.

But isn't that exactly what life is? long, largely uninteresting, stretches of woes and stresses, broken by rare and fleeting moments of the purest freedom one can taste, the kind that can only come when singing in the rain, or dancing in the moonlight. Experiences where you can let go of your life to spend just a few minutes enjoying freedom. That what makes life so worth it. Those moments when the right song hits you at the right time, in the right neighborhood to let you wash away the stress and woe. 

Even now, as I write this some 40-50 minutes after my experience, I still find myself buzzing with the person I allowed to exist on that levee, who had spent so long trapped in my mind full of rats keeping her down. I find the rats finally allowing that person to join them in that field under the willow tree. I find myself with a moment that I will forever remember, and all I can feel is thankfulness that I experienced that.