The Meadow 141 Tonight, I am standing drunk in a park, talking to two strangers. I will not remember their names, nor could I pick their faces out of a crowd. However, I will remember that one of them calls me a book of clichés. I don’t remember what brought us to that conversational thread, but I remember he said, Where do you get all these? You’re like a collection of sayings. Don’t you have any original thoughts? And for a moment I am taken aback. I lean back in the swing that I have planted myself and look up to the night sky. What does it mean to be original anyway? Everything is derivative, these swings were based on swings that came before. Even before that the parts that make them had to be made, and you can trace those even further. Was I any different, how could I be? My very being is derivative, both metaphorically and literally. When my personality was shaped by the material conditions I lived in and my body is a combination of my parents. And the same was true of them. As I looked out past stars that every life has lived and died under to the expanse of nothing, I wondered. Was everything just a copy of a copy, one long game of telephone stretching into infinity from the one first moment of originality? I could not know, but as I sat there breathing in the cold night air and listening to the faint humming of cars in the distance, I also realized it was all individual. This swing set, though it had been based on other things before wasn’t those things, it was here. Because it was here, it was different to all the others that were not. All the things that had happened over its life had changed it made it unique, purely because no other swing had experienced the exact same things. I was no different. I was a quilt sewn together of patches of other things, scraps of people I had loved and words that had connected with me. Yet I was entirely my own. I may not have been original, but I was an individual. I looked back at the night sky and saw it in a way that could only be seen through my eyes, and with the confidence that can only come from a drunken epiphany I say, I may not be original. I mean nothing is, but like I’m still my own thing. Nothing else could be me. Ya know like, I may not be original, but I am like … individual. One of the strangers offers a slight chuckle, That’s what we’re talking about, like what does that mean? Originality Jacob L. Ledesma
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