Confessions of a 5'1"

Write your own philosophical essay based on Thoreau's writing style in "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"


I went to the roof because I wished to live with the knowledge that I'm able to go anywhere or do anything if I so desired and have the legs to get me there or the brain to think it, to face only what confronts me, and see if I can find the ones that hide, and not, as I stalk them, to discover that the most prominent was attatched to the back of my head. I did not yearn to live what life did not give me, it is not my part to live it; nor did I long to snatch any extra years from its pockets, unless the significance of breathing stolen air was compulsory. I wanted to experience personally and see beyond the horizon without losing my side of the skyline, to demand from life the most I am to receive, and condemn it if presented with a secondhand, and, if it displays a sense of generosity, to withdraw to my place with murmurs of gratitude, careful not to disturb any turning hourglass.

Every day I catch the same faces and put up my own like a magician; though some stories do not follow how it is written; like a pebble dropped in water, it is changed but still the same. Like this, we forget who we really are and following a series of I wonder and I would like to be, only finally jumping in the wrong direction, to realize we are not in the right place. The correct lives we did not live returns to its birthplace and we are left staring into the unfamiliar eyes we, in one moment, caught sight of and tried to duplicate into our own. Life first cracks then crumbles, and later wrecked, to be left with shards waiting to be recycled.

To lavish a day, better yet, a week, and more a year or a lifetime as purposefully as clouds, and moving in the direction to where they are meant to be, with much assistance from the breath of invisible forces, to flow so easily. Why fret over the future when an empty stomach beckons for your attention at the now? If a clock ticks, let it tick until time runs out, or much sooner its batteries. If the lights go out, why should we sleep? Let us inhale what is put before us and do with it what we can until we can do no more, but reach for what our hands and fingers are allowed to grasp, and to only miss by a skim will result in nothing and undertake the task at a later day. Life is limited but only to the amount we allow. I consume color with my mouth and taste with my eyes, and when I sleep I find myself back stage and looking from behind those black, black curtains of eyelids, to uncover a scar to another world, and not, when I realize, that I am only in a dream, do what reality prevents. The imagination has always been consistent, more so than material things, and only distinguishable from truth when we challenge it. My intuition tells me that this is where I am, and if I really are rotting alive, let us be the witness of my emotional health, for I think that life permits me only to be me, and you as you are; no other.