Keys to Life

funciona! photo by corbata1982.

The Backspace key is my nemesis. All of these words spill out of me, and just as quickly slip into oblivion as I hold down the Backspace key. Really, these keys hold such warm or bleek possibilities if they could be applied to life. Home. Pause/Break. Delete. End. When I was in Budapeste huddled on a bench in a train station platform, I could have pressed the Home key. During my marriage troubles, I wanted to Pause all of the arguing, but then came the realization that we need to make a clean Break of things. But there are no clean breaks in a divorce. For years afterward, I still thought about her. I imagined I could return to the home we had lived in, and she would be in the kitchen cooking up something, and the dogs would come running and lick me to death as I came through the door. But all of that was gone. A different family lived there now, and it would be so much easier if I could just forget it all. Delete, and it would be like we had never met.

Is life worth all of this struggle? Finding happiness, going to work, paying the bills? Sometimes it seems like it would be easier to press the End key. But I’ve never figured out what happens when you press the End key. An end will come soon enough, so I might as well enjoy myself while I’m here. Insert myself back into the dating world. Now it’s all about making some kind of Shift. Taking Ctrl. Stop watching life pass me by and get the courage to Enter.

Enter.

Enter.

There, now I have some space to work with. It’s time to make use of these twenty-six keys that aren’t so easy. Got to find the right combination of them to find my way, but they also hold infinite possibility. Find the right sequence and you’ve got the complete works of Shakespeare, the Declaration of Independence, and the diary of Anne Frank . Lose your way, and you’ve got the Life of Brettanicus.