Change

by P.R.Banks

This one just came to me one day, fairly well formed and pretty much pushing to get out onto a page somewhere. That it is a monologue is all I will confirm, the context and reasons for the monologue are left for the reader to decide.


I didn't believe it at first. I railed against it, declaring "I am the Rock, by which everyone else is measured.". I almost believed it too, not realising how devoid of hubris I was. But the pictures told me the truth in a way I could not deny.

I had changed, am changing and will again change - even if for just one last time.

It is just that change doesn't come quite so easily to me as it does to you. It takes effort, care and deliberation on my part. But for you, you change so flexibly and quickly I am bewildered at the rate of it. Seemingly you never are the same person I talked to in the morning as the one I am talking to at dinner.

Of course I was simply jealous. I wanted to be as free as that myself, able to strike up a fancy, a pose, a personna at a moments notice. That, I thought, was really living.

I am sorry, I was young. I think have matured, a little, now.

After all, at the time, how could I have known that you would look upon my deliberate pace of slow change and envy my certainty? That you wouldn't realise that I had no certainity at all, that my pace was chosen to try and compensate for this...

It is only now that I realise that, fundamentally, you and I are the same. That we both are coping with uncertainty as best we can, both of us were, are, really living in our own way.

I think I understand that.

It is why I am writing this now. I want you to understand it as well. Oh - I realise that it isn't important that you do, but that I lend it importance myself. And I know that it isn't important to you because, by the time it is and you have picked this paper up, you already will be someone else for whom this is most likely trivia.

All that doesn't matter, in the final analysis because it isn't you I am writing this for. I simply want the self affirmation gained from the writing of this. It may not be certainity, but for now it will do.

And so in closing, now I change.


Philip R. Banks
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