The Essence of Aspiration

    A young man sits alone at a bar on a Friday night. Perhaps he is drinking alcohol, aiming to forget his sorrows; or maybe just water, passing the time and awaiting a new beginning. He drinks steadily, as he has done for the past year. Walks slowly, meticulously, with a small limp in his left leg. Quite possibly from birth or maybe a childhood accident. 

    Nobody knew much of anything of the man. Only that he was in his mid-twenties and he wasn’t from around the area; nobody had heard of him until he started coming to the bar. Every Friday for a year, the man came in and ordered the same enigmatic drink, sat alone at the end of the bar, and conversed with nobody. There was an unspoken agreement, since nobody ever seemed keen enough to want to talk with him either. 

    The others in the town were just as dejected, only they created a lifestyle around drinking together. They would gather to forget their displeasure and make room for more. Most importantly, the people from the town had always been. They grew up there. Their parents grew up there. Their kids would grow up there. The town was as it is, and will be as it lies.

    The peculiar man was known around town simply as the man at the bar and he was not talked about any more than that. Until, one Friday, the man didn’t walk into the bar. He didn’t limp through the door, didn’t order his same undetectable drink, and didn’t sit at the far end talking with nobody. He was simply gone.

    “Where did he go?” people began to ask. “What happened to the man at the bar?” For weeks people speculated about what could have happened.

    “I heard he jumped off a building,” was a common rumor, “Well I heard he was hit by a car,” the popular response. Each person in the town formed an elaborate story of the man’s death. For a couple of weeks, that is. And then, just as quickly as it began, people stopped talking about the man altogether. He became the ugly truth in the corner of your eye that nobody wants to look at, washed away by the tides of alcohol.

    Another year went by and still the man had not returned. Nobody ever expected he would. But then, to the shock and awe of every person who knew of him in the past, he resurfaced. This time not at the end of the bar alone, but on the TV, resting in the corner of the room. What people saw on the TV was a man who was purposeful, confident, and willing.

    “That’s him, I know that’s him,” the others in the bar began saying, “turn that up.” So, the bar was silenced but for the voice of the man who used to drink alone in the bar.

    “Tell us, how did you go from being nobody to being somebody?” Asked the interviewer. And with his answer, the town knew, the man would never come back. The man had broken the cycle and he had flown free. The man said only this:

It is only when we realize what we are not, that we realize what we want to become.