It was winter again; the crisp air bit at the boys septum. Red droplets began to paint the floor as he stepped inside to greet his father. Father saw his boy’s plight and retold the same old story of his tortured youth; nights spent out in the yard, his mother caring too much for the color of her carpet. As the tired tale plugs the boy’s frostbitten ears, he cuts Father off.
“why did you choose to have children?”
Father spoke that day. The stones spat from the great sphynx’s mouth crushed the boy, liquified on impact.
“To have children is the most narcissistic thing that a man can do,” Father responded, gazing sympathetically at the puddle of his son.
The boy solemnly vowed, as only a child can, to live without children. He decided he would never perpetuate this senseless and aimless voyage upon another generation. The boy congealed, reconstituted by his newfound purpose. He sauntered off to his room, his dragging soles tore up the hardwood in his wake. The boy was driven. Words began flowing, sentences began arranging themselves in his head. His treatise came into focus, he began to organize his thoughts: the time of man was over.
This is what he wrote:
Captain lays quietly, hegemony cleaved of his freight. The volume low and focus diluted, his villages are pillaged, his honors are scavenged; he paints the deck silently all the while. The work he poured and the passion of his personage lay varnish to the sea stained planks. He leaks thick like oil. I’m of his ilk, a man all the same, and our rivers run brackish, our basins muddy, our reservoirs are left unattended. Banks erode, it's time to cash out. Unperturbed passers by comment on the beauty of that orange reflected by the glistening body. The lamps have been knocked over and the hull is ablaze. Let us go quickly. Walk together into that calm we all so crave. That bleak and dreary endlessly delicious nothing we all fear returning to. Let us claim this chapter for ourselves. Let us be the the first to choosethe end.
As blood dripped onto the page, and blotted out those last words, the boy saw himself clearly. Sitting calmly in the warmth of his home. He felt the walls around him with more and more clarity as the blood pooled on his page. He saw that he may be only for Father to feel purpose, but he was now and he always will have been. There’s no perfect fulfillment swelling within him. No sense of completion to his thoughts, but a throughway for them has been presented. The boy bleeds exactly as his father, but in the warmth and comfort of Father’s own home.
There was confluence within the boy. He felt sustained by the constant confusion. He had purpose definitively, he was born for his father to have purpose. Life’s great question is seems to be answered, but theres no change in his being. Nirvana hasn’t been reached, enlightenment definitely isn’t had. Theres no sense to his knowing why. It was time for him to concede this value he’s given to purpose. He wasn’t asking anymore, he didn’t need to know.
As the child sat back, he let his thoughts wander, he picked up his pen once more, and scrawled through the crimson beads on his page. He to satisfy only his own mind, and quell the thoughtlessness running through his head. He felt put in his place, the hopelessness pervasive. He began to connect the scarlet dots on the page. The smearing blood soaked into the paper, covering every word he wrote. He read back his work, or what was left behind. His found poem, was shorter than most. Let us be.
Calm washed over the newborn babe, every stimulus was a wonder and there was nothing but inconsequence. Understanding was anywhere but here, and the boy was here to stay.