STEAMER'S BLOG

Steamer

Mal and me: separated at birth.
Monday, May 15, 2006

Every day, I find a new parallel with Mal.

And today brings another one.

He has nothing left to his life but his job and his crew. I have lost almost everything and everyone I ever had, for one reason or another. His only means of survival was to keep flying. I have only to finish out the day and get to the next.

It strains the mind a bit wondering how a man's life gets to this point - what he did to deserve it. Mal was a rebel but it doesn't mean he was in the wrong. And I'm just a guy who thought with the wrong internal organ, made one stupid decision and turned his whole life into a rollercoaster ride of agony and ecstasy. What happened to Mal's family, to his comrades in arms? What happened to everyone I loved, everyone I thought loved me? No one close to me has died recently (knock on wood), but an unshakable sense of loss bites at me nevertheless.

Maybe that was part of the tension between Mal and Inara. Maybe the only thing he really needed to die a happy man was love, but for the life of him he couldn't find it, nor could it be bothered to look for him. Then Inara came and then she went, and Mal's chance was gone. It slipped from my grasp, likewise. Everybody says that when you stop looking, that's when it'll come. But I stopped looking a year ago, and there's nothing. Not even a friendly devious glance from any direction. Life may be good overall, but verily this is the first time it hasn't sucked; and although not at the corner of No and Where, I'm very much alone out here, and so at almost 27 I'm a mean old man. I know what you're all going to say now, I'm young, I've got time, it won't always be this way, rant, rant, rave, rave. But when both sides leave you there, battered, burned and given up for dead, the sky goes dark: it no longer matters where you are or who you are, and the enemy is everywhere, and everyone.

So here's us, on the raggedy edge. Mal is rudderless. I'm drifting from nowhere to nowhere. Wind blows northerly, he goes north. Wind is southerly, I drift south. Come a day I'll no longer know the difference between a hawk and a handsaw, nor will I care.

somewhere there's a soccer game
I can hear the wild crowd moan
it's not that life here's distasteful to me
it's just that I'm all alone
in time I'll only think of you
when I'm buttering my toast
or in some other reflective moment
when I expect the least or the most

it's not that it's such a mystery
I saw it from miles away.

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