my college professor always told us not to be spiritually unhappy. he told us to search up and down and sideways and abide by all truths and rules instead of teaching us calculus. he told us to let the flowers on rolling hills and a man walking alone in paris to be the most beautiful things we have witnessed and the boys snickered and the girls cracked their gum but i listened.
my college professor once told us that somebody, someday, will look at you like you were the best thing in the world, and i could tell that he'd been hurt before. then again the word hurt could mean an infinite amount of things.
he was young, about thirty, and i could imagine him with his excuse for a girlfriend sitting on a park bench with him at two in the morning cautiously blowing smoke into the air like it meant something more than happiness. and tears running down her face mirroring his in the limelight. street lights glistened at the appearance of any human body at this hour.
“have a cigarette with me. what were we talking about? do you remember?”
her own voice echoed in my mind. oh god he was happy. he liked the way she dressed in all black on saturday nights and she appreciated his company because smoking cigarettes in the park alone just wouldn't be the same if she was without him.
"i’ve written my number and my name on old benches clutched my sweaty palm to the edges, too afraid to ever give up the security of a lone object that quite frankly had quite a bit of meaning to me.” she said.
she found herself sitting on park benches alone not because she had to rest, or maybe another destination to go to, but because she liked the feeling—
"everyone in this world is all together but we’re apart. alone. it doesn’t matter whether the man standing next to the bench will sit down or not, i sit on park benches to be anonymous. even if somebody did ask for my story, i could make up anything i wanted, and that person would fade away and another would come along and i would make up another story just to pass time,” she said.
and that made her spiritually happy.
and maybe thats just the reason why our professor wanted to pass that along to us.