He always thought himself a happy person, despite everything. For no other reason than this: to him, life is precious. He doesn't know quite what it is, although he never gives up trying to find out, but it has a claim on him, a claim beyond the ordinary, a claim stretching beyond the instinct of survival.
Which is why he's slightly disconcerted when he finds himself seated on a window ledge, on the wrong side. It is the side on which the moon falls sharply, where the wind ruffles his hair. The other side is the one with the warm yellow light and the safe floor he has known since his feet first touched ground. His back is turned away from it tonight.
His feet are dangling now. They're cold.
The yearning to leap - and it won't be just a leap, he will fly, with his hands out - brings a small half smile to his face.
He looks down at the ground, but it's too far to see. All the better, because the ground is where the ugliness of it will be: the blood and guts and despair. Here, at this place, at this moment, there is only something pure, something sacred, a secret language in his heart that he's never heard before. He doesn't know whether he will hear it again.
Beep beep.
Not today.
Later, though he knows he won't, he can't stop yearning for that feeling he had, sitting outside, more naked than he's ever been before, despite the fact that he was fully clothed. Naked, to himself, as if all the people he ever was, as if all the things he ever felt, had come together in a single dazzling moment.
No, he won't jump, he won't leap, he won't crash, wild and furious and free. He will keep on plodding one step at a time, and his only comfort is that he may yet forge his own path in the wilderness.
Which is why he's slightly disconcerted when he finds himself seated on a window ledge, on the wrong side. It is the side on which the moon falls sharply, where the wind ruffles his hair. The other side is the one with the warm yellow light and the safe floor he has known since his feet first touched ground. His back is turned away from it tonight.
His feet are dangling now. They're cold.
The yearning to leap - and it won't be just a leap, he will fly, with his hands out - brings a small half smile to his face.
He looks down at the ground, but it's too far to see. All the better, because the ground is where the ugliness of it will be: the blood and guts and despair. Here, at this place, at this moment, there is only something pure, something sacred, a secret language in his heart that he's never heard before. He doesn't know whether he will hear it again.
Beep beep.
Not today.
Later, though he knows he won't, he can't stop yearning for that feeling he had, sitting outside, more naked than he's ever been before, despite the fact that he was fully clothed. Naked, to himself, as if all the people he ever was, as if all the things he ever felt, had come together in a single dazzling moment.
No, he won't jump, he won't leap, he won't crash, wild and furious and free. He will keep on plodding one step at a time, and his only comfort is that he may yet forge his own path in the wilderness.
1 comment:
Interesting... and moving - in an insightful kind of way.
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