How often do we live our lives without living. That is what I was doing. I went through the motions of being alive, but I was not living. My life held a type of love, but not the romantic love that is worth your time reading about, that would only come much later. The love I had was only the minimal type of love without which life could not exist and a kind of smoldering love that had an object but was without hope of ignition.
Let me add for my Ukranian audience, that I have no intention of fully publishing this if my readings don't acknowledge some of their interest in this work, even though that has nothing at all to do with the story.
So what does a dead person do with life? I was not unlike those zombies in the movies. Whoever I touched and whoever I was around shared with me my sense of the undead. We went through the motions, but any real, living person would have immediately seen that we were going through the motions. It is the reason that the "hippies" would laugh and jeer at the "suits". Was I a suit? Certainly, I was. I wore suits more than then now. But that was only a symptom for me, for plenty of people who are fully alive wear suits, just as many of the dead, like me wore jeans more often than not. And was I successful? In terms of money, yes. I had every intention, in my zombie-walk life of taking the next step in wealth. Perhaps not leaping over stages, but going from comfortable and safe, to obscenely comfortable and indolent. I did not use those terms, because they did not occur to me. Having been dead for so long, I had forgotten what it was like to be dead. And yes, I had lived, both as a child and as an adult. And yes, you were part of the reason that I was dead, even though your fault is limited.
My methodology for changing and the strange facts that would make the change possible were the same ones that would lead to dispair and, ultimately, to redemption.
It is late winter, the summer is not far ahead, but neither is it close. I am comfortable, but I am itching because I want a little more. My mind is reaching out looking for life in all the wrong places. It is looking for some more money and it looks in a usual place for those with a little money. I worked, you see. And on this warm day, my mind turned towards someone who owed me money. My mind, seeking life in fortune, wondered if it could find some additional money. And the journey began inexorably as the little kernal of greed, which I mistook for life, reached out for additional kindling which it would find in abundance. The resulting flame would consume the money, consume the greed and release the little part of me that was still alive for real from the hot coals and give me a chance for redemption, a chance for virtue.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
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