a fifty ninth story...'eddy's retina'

Eddy was a passionate young man, perhaps with passions just like yours.

He cared a lot about things.

He cared a lot about, and expected a lot of himself too.

(and frequently felt let down).

..Eddy also expected a lot of other people – his family, boyfriends, girlfriends, and so on.

You might say he was naïve in this way.

(He was).

It took dear old Eddy half a life time to learn that in spite of all the marvellous gifts mother nature had afforded him, he still had to rely on the relative gumption and general willingness of other people..

..Just like everybody else – How tedious!

Alas, some of these other people, it seemed, were less than (faultlessly) reliable.

And so Eddy brooded.

He brooded, and brooded and brooded.  Had Eddy been a prize turkey, he may well have laid an egg.

And the egg would have hatched and grown into something terrible; the egg would have become Eddy’s shadow.

A shadow of the dark and haunting variety, of the kind that follows you everywhere, stalks your dreams, chases you up and down the labyrinth ways of your mind.

‘Quit brooding, Eddy’, his friend Jemima would say.  Or implore him with the equally useless but well intentioned platitude – ‘don’t be sad’.

‘I’m not sad’, Eddy would lie, looking at Jemima and seeing the splinter in her eye.

Thing is Eddy could not see the plank of wood in his.

And the more he mooned over the irrationality and unpredictability of other people, and the ruinous effect their actions however well construed appeared to have on his existence, the more Eddy became convinced that planet earth was a pitiless place, a pit of despair.

William Shakespeare, in his most endearing enduring tragedy, Hamlet, understood Eddy’s malaise; Eddy being in the process of losing all mirth, unwittingly guilty of psychological projection.

The egg turned shadow, projected onto one human canvas after another, all of them belonging to other people!

People are this, people are that, people are XY and Z, Eddy would postulate. 

And he wasn’t wrong.

But he was only half right.

Eddy had begun to live in a room full of mirrors, where all he could see was himself.  No one else. 

Not even Jemima whom he adored.

And because of all of mother nature’s gifts afforded him when he was an egg growing in his birth mother’s tummy, he was too vain, too proud to see beyond the flickering shadows cast by all the other people – his family, boyfriends, girlfriends – dancing callously, he opined, around and around his retina.

Life: one, twice, thrice unkind.