The problem with running - running away - as opposed to running towards - is that you're never looking ahead, and then, without noticing, you reach a place far worse than you could have ever run from. I was too convinced, too knowing of some without knowing of other, the genius of mind blended with a blindness of mind, pulling me and pushing me ever further, trapping me in my escape until the walls between dimensions of spacetime bent and I found to my horror, my footprints in time.
Like an unwieldy giant or a Tokyo monster, my every movement threw shockwaves of time in all directions in ways too powerful to coordinate, wrecking even this abandoned landscape upon which I tread. Every step forward took us another year forward in time. No! I pleaded, this can't be. This can't be me doing this. All the lives in the world - maybe the universe - the truth too horrible to know - affected by my every step, rushing a time that was not ready. I stopped, hoping time would catch up with me, but that only made time stop still.
Oceans of fear pooled at my feet, rising with every stationary moment. What now? In forty steps I travel forty years and in a thousand steps a thousand years - or stay where I am and drown the world. Maybe I can undo what I've done and un-run what I've run, and step backwards to the place where I crossed into this web of time where I as the spider tremble the lives of all. But my steps back were not the same as my steps in - no, those steps were untraceable. In my mind's ear I heard the screams as airplanes landed backwards as souls rushed forward to catch flights they'd missed. I could neither move nor not move - a hell of no time as I pulled the strings of all living things with my slightest motion.
It was at that point I realized what I said. I said: not me. I said reality was not for me - I could do anything and be anything and dream anything the universe asked - but not in its reality but on my own terms, my own way - the hope of unreality. In the world of unreality I'd build the perfect empire, devoid of suffering and filled only with dreams of love, every soul a beacon of light and every tenderness treasured. This I offered to the world - all I needed was just one piece of unreality to make it so. Instead, I bent reality, warping it with my will, twisting the lives of those who'd been true.
How could I face them now, the countless lives upended through the seismic tantrums of my quest? I was sure I was nothing - that I should believe I was nothing - that it was right and proper to know I was nothing - and thus nothing would be tangled and nothing would be lost by the running of me. But the insanity was I was everything - the crying baby, the breeze upon the trees, the hopes of a generation - what have I done? I cheated them all. No one understood my need to be without having to be - that if I were to be then all hell would break loose and mankind would end - and now, I had ended it anyway, trapped in a vortex of time, all hope of ever doing good banished by my mere presence.
And so I chose to die.
But I forgot, I was in the time vortex of unreality and my death brought me life, to give up was to begin again. Even with the sorrow I created, reality held the one thing my unreality could never have: hope. To master reality is to submit to reality. My running had taken me far. I sat exhausted, a crumpled soul on the vast dunes of hard times and lonely, loathing winds. How was I to say I'm sorry to the world? Turns out no one knew it was me that wrinkled the fabric of time. Terrified, I took hesitant steps back to the world of the living. I was relieved to hear the children laughed on - and I cried. I knew I had no love to offer them - until one offered me a flower and she asked me why I die.
------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment