Back To Ignorance

They say ignorance is bliss, and Christ, they might be right for once. Back when I was a kid, everything made sense. Santa slid down the chimney with a sack full of toys, the Easter Bunny hid eggs like it was the most important job in the world, Superman punched through walls and never asked for a raise, and the good guy always got the girl while the credits rolled and the lights came up. You believed it all because nobody had kicked you in the teeth yet. The world was a cartoon, bright colors, no commercials for depression or alimony.Then the years start piling on like unpaid bar tabs. The girl you measured your whole life against takes one look and laughs, not cruel, just honest, the way a cat looks at a three-legged mouse. Your dream job? Turns out it’s fluorescent lights, a stapler that jams, and a boss who smells like cough drops and defeat. You clock in, you clock out, you drink enough to forget the clock exists. Romance turns into child support, ambition turns into a studio apartment with roaches that pay rent on time.You keep going, though. You get older, fatter, balder, meaner. The memories start dropping away like dead leaves; some you shake off on purpose, others just fall. You can’t remember her face anymore, or why you ever thought that job mattered, or what it felt like to believe in anything that didn’t come in a bottle. The past blurs, the future shrinks to tomorrow’s hangover.And then one day you’re sitting in a rented room that smells like soup and old piss, staring at a cracked wall, and you realize you’re almost there again, back to that sweet dumb nothing you had as a kid. No hopes left to lose, no illusions to bury. Just a quiet. The brain finally gives up the fight, folds its hand, goes home.They lower you into the ground or burn you to ash, doesn’t matter. Either way the lights go out for good, and you’re ignorant again. Pure, perfect, worm-eaten ignorance.Bliss, baby. Took a lifetime of a detour, but we made it.