METANOIA

PBR

Oh, Columbus Ohio.

There is a song called, "Ohio is for lovers," but I think that is horseradish. Columbus, in particular, is for the outliers. It is for the quirky and the queer as much as it is a giant womb for the carbon copied Midwestern meat-headed husks. A zombie nation of blue, scarlet and gray wearing Ohio State attire with jeans underneath, walking on the same pavement as Goths, Metal-heads, freaks, oddities, outliers, and people with a wide range of originality or lack thereof. It isn't hard to find a man with implanted horns talking to a devoutly Catholic cheerleader wearing pink shorts with "Juicy" written on her ass.

Columbus is full of the less accepted, unusual, and oddities. There are many districts in the city, each with its own "je ne sais quoi" that bestows a different experience for all visitors. Several are well-known; like the arts district, the gay district, the Ohio State campus area, the ghetto, the German village, Chinese village, student housing, the pristine upper-middle class Grandview area to the West, the isolated suburbia, and beyond that, the rundown industrial zone.

The relentless heat washed their faces as they left the air-conditioned heaven of the Port Columbus airport. Pete and Silas were quiet as they walked out of the airport, both still in shock from what had happened on the plane. Misha, on the other hand, could still smell the guy that was sitting next to him, or at least he thought he could.

Silas twiddled with the phone in his hand. A few more pixels were dead. He had dodged a bullet. In a way, he felt blessed, but no one dodges death forever. This near miss only provided him with new insight.

You see, we have this idea that death is a terrible thing, one that we need to avoid at all costs. Which is odd considering death is the only thing you can take for granted in life. I don't know what gave us the idea life is supposed to go on and on and on...

Dying, in a way, is a noble act. It is a moment in which our time on stage is over, and we make way for a new act before being booed off the stage. There is grace in death.

Imagine you were unable to die, not from pain, not from starvation, not from anything. Our bodies are adaptive. It learns to cope with pain. If nothing could kill you, you would eventually lose the motivation to eat, to move and, hell, if it doesn't kill you, to breathe. Over time, everything would start to lose meaning. Death is the thing that gives meaning to our lives. We have an inherent understanding of this. That's why we want to live on in a different way, through our children. We want to live on, not as who we are, but, in a manner of speaking, by passing on the torch of knowledge.

Our stories are not limited to the span of our own lives. It is one written through generations. Life renews itself in each cycle. Each virtue we develop gets passed on, but so do our vices. Each trauma and pain echo through generations. A troubled parent can make or break us as kids. So think about that next time you decide to really hurt someone. Because the harm you are doing can ripple through a lineage.

At that moment of death, it is usually not the things we did that bother us. It is mostly the things we didn't do that standout. It is always the choices we didn't make, the paths we didn't take, or the risks we couldn't face we regret. One way or another, life will teach us how to deal with all of our stupid, wrong and dysfunctional choices we have made in the past. Through life, we will learn to take those actions and their consequences and treat it as our being. There are no words more haunting than, "I could have." That is what Silas' life had been reduced to over the years. A series of, "I could have, but chose not to," perpetually repeating itself. He thought the choice in that sentence had given him strength, not realizing the process was eating away at his soul.

Their first stop was to be Lisa and Anda's house. There was a barbecue party, and they had been cordially invited. Before they arrived at the party, the guys made a pit stop on High Street, the north-south axis of the city. Their excuse was Silas needed to buy a change of clothes. In reality, they wanted to walk around a bit, get a feel for the city again. They had a lot of luggage to drag around, so High Street, having the best pavement and the most interesting sites, seemed like the best place to walk. They saw the campus, the Wexner area, the remodeled union building, but for some reason unbeknownst to them, none of them wanted to cross the street and go on campus. They seemed to have outgrown their university, and it wasn't the campus that made them call this city their second home. The best friends they had from their college days were the friends they met outside.