Flaming Out

Lucas.

That movie brings to mind so many memories. How I loved Winona Ryder then, and even now I still remember the innocence with which I viewed relationships. Man, did I want to be Corey Haim, the lucky bastard.

Lucas was one of those last movies in high school that I remember watching with my brother – before the onset of the change that wasn’t a change. I think of him and somehow I am welling up inside with pain and pity. What a waste of a life.

There is neither reason nor design that I understand what has been wrought in my brother’s life. Could it be that God, in His infinite wisdom, doled out hardship to the innocent as well as to the guilty? One can say something about Job, he who dared to grapple the infinity of God, and succeeding, in his own way, to make God acknowledge him. Sure, the Lord restored Job to full health and gave him a new family to live the happily ever after.

But the book never did talk about the injustice or the deaths of Job’s older children.

Ah, Lucas, Lucas – I remember the locusts that were an integral part of the movie’s atmosphere. These were the 17-year locusts that wait all those years, experience a frenzy of growth, and then flame out. For my brother, he was 17 when he reached the height of who he could have been, and then he flamed out. How he has been since then, well, is just like being a 17-year old. On the verge of getting somewhere, but somehow not getting there…. on the verge of discovering himself, but somehow never achieving it.

That’s his life, that’s his fate. As much as I try to get away from that fate, we are bound by a common heritage and bonds that cannot be denied. Denial never does erase the sense of helplessness. I am not Job, still a Lucas who survived getting out of his cocoon, but still looking for a new place to take root.