What is man if it were merely him?
Existentialism permeates my day, I am it. The pondering is a tumor - a cancer.
The air is frigid. I sit atop a stone at the edge of an incline. The dusk sky is calm and clear, the horizon like an attenuated whitewash, cleansing the nature before the darkness that will soon roll in. I should set my tent across this concave...
My beard itches of a thousand ants, a frivolous vanity. My belly aches with the quarrels of a million pidgeons, an unwanted testament. Lying down is merely a trek itself, these hasty thoughts.
Some nights I dream for there to be a desert beyond these mountains and forests. The trees know me by silhouette. They stare into you, but you can never seem to find the right angle to stare back at them, as if a flock of hawks were orbiting a porcupine. At least among the sands I can slither with only the dusts to keep me company, a constant reminder, a billion glaves slicing away at me.
At dawn's wake lay a pink wave of morning sunshine, a child's delight, so I keep my head down. I will get to see her another day, she usually waits for me at the same hour after the night has passed.
It is inexplicable, and also absurd, but there is a breeze, always, and it blows toward the west. So I follow, and that I've been doing for my whole existence. Who is it that chooses this feature? Is it a God giving me a sign? I don't think he'd be that pitiful of me. Instead, I like to think that there's an ocean to the east, or that I'm being escorted to my crucifix with the light shove of a thousand spectators.
I formed a blindness to the crinkling of the leaf litter. As if one were meandering about a liminal and vacated cavern, in absense of all light and life. Regardless, the forest is fairly placid. It is a sanctuary that cradles me, allowing me to trickle down it's valleys in act of a Sunday walkabout. The bosom is always seeping, fruits are abundant, and game is merely that. This playground of folly is not fit for an aspiring father, but will sustain him until he chooses to no longer claim what is being offered as his.
If the flowers could run, I presume they would attempt flight. After hours of trekking, I often splay across the infested flooring, taking interest in those who seem to be okay with bearing my presence. Their faces often feel like that which I would imagine the nose of a cloud. Although I can't help but realise, moments before the closure of my act of dalliance, these friends seem to sob, wilt, well before my necessary departure. Hence why I now choose to allow them my absence, I cannot be the sap which detaches them - I already made that mistake once. I could not feel myself worthy to ornament their life, but if not upon my own, then where else would it be adorned?
Dusk in the valley often settles with a last hurrah of gleaming rays from beneath the tree-tops. My eyes adjust like a boiling frog and I often drift robotically until the mosquitos remind me that I should finally make that switch to lorrying cold blood. In one of the final shimmers from the sun, I spot a familiar dissonance. Mounted atop a rock in the near distance, like a monarch, a golden and ferocious reflection. Its orange rump makes for a delicate sight amongst the flood of dreary, inanimate vultures. I've seen this beast many times before, but never as my friend. My belly aches, and each individual strand of hair tethered to my back feels as if it is being tugged by a moth. My previous spear fell victim to the fiery souldance of our last encounter. My shadow is wrenching my collar, but my soul stands in front of me, kneeling, begging, sobbing. Suppose an angel could shed a tear, wouldn't a man step in its place? I choose the crown of thorns.
I make no hesitation to create a scene as I march towards the throne. My crucifix stands oblivious to my crunching footsteps, seemingly dumbfounded by something over the hill in the horizon. I scale the slight vertical incline of granite and peek my head over the top. It is only now that the tiger points its head in my direction, and makes only an advance of the soul. Its gaze crystalises me. My body is now strangling me, contorting me into a chokehold, attempting to manifest the gravity of a million suns. This is an unnecessary weight, I've been carrying it for all that I can remember. I abandon my baggage and lurch myself up. Not once does this foe shiver, even if I tower at twice its height. Grounded, I dust-off my suit and raise my chin. This celebrity of the woods surely deserves my best before the main act. A dance it surely would adore, or even a reading - if only his gift of presence were as abundant as the flora. But a performance is not what I intend, instead it is my flesh served under a cloche. Its dreary and desperate panting tells me that it's not enough for him. Does a platter of hominid make him scoff? Or is it a cave laden with gemstones he desires?
The litter begs for his feet, so he advances aimlessly in the distance. But with one lift of his toe, I curse the beast, like a child with no mouth watching his toy be snatched by a sibling. For a moment the beast hesitates, had it a inkling of virtue? I had not uttered a word or shuffled an inch, yet it is as if it could not only hear, but grasp my pathetic wail. I beg for it to show me its tongue, or even a whisker, to truly show me that it can conquer all in this forest. The phony merely winks at me before moving on. His delicate stride in the distance disintegrates my soul, like staring at a mirror without a reflection. My eyes once a wrinkled salt-flat now lay muddied beneath the flood of a hurricane. My heart is now as jaded as the beggar that lost his purse. I lay defeated once again, letting the tears bellow from my unworthy eyes.
A grotto of wallow awaits me against the falling shadow of the mountains, my folly with the striped beast drained the sunlight from every inch of this valley. Moist, and oddly warm was this place, my eyes closed as I was now a mole drudging through the caverns of stone that occasion the hillside. Strolling led to a crawl, my hands grazing a dense patch of moss seemingly clinging to the last of the remaning radiation that gracefully caressed it in the final hours of daylight. My hands ran up the small mound, matting its tendrils and carving a model into my head that seems puzzlingly obtuse, and difficult to accustom my spine to. I flinched as a cold drip penetrated my neck and enlightened me to the story of this herd of spores. This shall be the device, my rest. My forehead directly below, capturing the essense that let my bushy friend writhe into existence. The droplets are occasional enough that my mind can be led to wander, frolicking the icy mountaintops. Long enough so to be struck by a stray hailstone, murdering my projection in favour of returning to my densely vacuous den for only a few moments.
Beaming sunlight felt congruent to my dreamstate. My mind could not accustom itself to the fact that the moss was brown. For it to be lucidly so, I should be able to manifest a carrot from the palm of my left hand. Briskly I was put to shame through my impotent wizardry, instead darting my attention to the roof of this establishment. Could my mind have been made that sodden from the stalactite? Surely the demonic slush above the cavern could not see its way to obstructing the gourgeous beauty of that which is the folicle of a green moss bed. As I crawl away and towards to my senses, its obese figure infuriates me - a hibernating grizzly. Her metabolism trickles off the energy of a bountiful spring harvest, postponing her infatuation with nature until a time across many moons, ignorant to the beauty of abundance simply awaiting, beckoning her outside at all times. Such radical philosophy and engineered comfort, so much so that I was made tea in the living room of a serially murdurous brute, a town home to a population of 1. A monster that does not consume the neighbourhood, but rather is it, and is so, a sycophantic slave to the needs of her society. If my serendipitous fortune is not hasty to show me its limits, then I shall become the tenacious martyr that beckons its presence.
In a stuperous act of volition, I bestow upon thee a stream of urine. The hot mess soaking through and gliding down the brown moss, blessing the air with a rancid purfume. But the slurry seemed not to disturb the beast. Was it visiting Valhalla? Had the clearly discordant warmth not permeated its fat and given it the jab I had thrown? I begged to see its claws, but its silence is tearing me to shreds far more viscerally. I bellowed out a vile chord of slurs and clawed at my appendages, streaking holes into the drapes that were bottling my whole spirit. Now close to absolute, I abandoned my belongings in the cavern and marched toward the foothills.
Smoke billowed from my nostrils, an encircling rage warmed every corner of my machine. I bounced effortlessly from stone to stone, reaching heights and angles one would only find as a novel form of recreation. It is a blistering feeling to be freed from the debilitating condition of indecision to carry my knapsack. Such itch is now left to the bear, it will be familiar with its utility after its daze hardens, but unfamiliar to the weight.
The incline no longer coerces my legs to beg for rest, and instead, I am featherweight, gliding like a swallow through occasional bush and rock. In a casual gradient, the land on the northern face of this mountain converted from barren rock to lush grass. Westwards around the bark of a sapling, I meet eyes with another subservient of the woods, recklessly indulging in the delicacy of sustenance. The goatee of his, jiggles with pride as he mulches the litter between his jaw, oblivious to the eminating ferocity slowly approaching him. Was he perhaps also inept at connecting to the abundance around him? Or had he also become jaded to the forest like myself? I'm sure that the beast would never have bear witness to a biped grabbing him by the horns, and forcing his eyes unto an apparition.
His horns were an adornment of ivory. Never before have I felt such slick texture, it was more than a novelty, almost poetic, akin to a narritive. His intricate jewellery was the summation of carefully dyed rings stacked on top of one another, cascading as a fractal through shades of brown, black, green and creamy white. Such delicate choice from his part, and a magnificent display of triumph. Truly an absurd act that strangely exhibits an unfamiliar virtue, protruding out from all that would require him to exist in this sanctuary. I was entranced by this, as if I could see a glint of someone winking at me from beyond the fog that lay in the groves ahead. Divergent are my thoughts now for once a senile beast I sported for survival. Although a spec, I see what I could only imagine is the cap of a gemstone, one that I do not wish to tarnish with my brutish palms. As such I freed the beast, and stand dumbfounded as his most violent struggle was that which to leap away only after his shackles had fallen to the ground, unintentionally tripping over his legs as he darted towards the west. After shaking the trance, I only now observe the clarity of this altercation. It was surely incomprehensible as to why the beast simply let me roughhouse him. His placidity was truly bizzare, as if hexxed by my spirit to delay ones reaction. His eyes were glazed, as if staring through glass at something in the horizon which challenges his immortality. Had we both conjured a spell for each other?
Perhaps I was the one who is inept. To god, this interaction had left a scratch in the perfect orb of my soul, but to me, an entire valley was carved through it. This gap, it's excruciating, and I am now enthralled with a lust to uncover such truth! So I embark on the journey through my horny plight, following the nuance of the mountain around the western edge with aim to loop around to where the bear kept guard of my belongings. Never before had I dare entertain the idea of backtracking, or even consider the taboo of travelling east after choosing my initial fate the day I opened my eyes here. Such an anticipation to turn the corner of the cliff-face left me bursting through my skin, at last I'd let myself see the east, and then beyond that, I will uncover the final formation of that woman beyond the fog.
Alas! Good lord it was bright! The sheer strength of its radiation hazed and singed my front side. I raise my arm to cover my face in protest of the brightness of the inferno, and protect my oculars from being viscerated until they adjust. Never before have I felt such warmth, not even in a geothermal pool, it had to be that of a god. As I wander past the corner, I see it lucidly, a wildfire forming a perfect front from the east. A formation so elegantly crafted, it had to be the march of a Roman army made of magma. As my awe subsided, and my senses returned, I could smell my former acquaintences burning. I would not have time to befriend them before the fire engulfs them, nor do I wish to let the inanimate become the signatory of my demise. The claiming of my journey to simply a force of nature would be a botched transaction. I had to see it through that the creatures I had encountered are not merely a flock of garish lout, but rather collectively form a totem of many of my own ancestors.
With due haste I scatter up the hill like a cockroach towards the crest which lay habitat to only occasional moss and lichen sprinkled amongst the rock. It was my only reasonable salvation given the sprint that this front contests me with. Aside to my adrenal rush, I could not help but scratch the thought of how short the grace of my presence may have been had I initially spited the gods and trotted eastwards at my birth. This phoenix of flames gives me a deep sense of dread that the wind was not a feature of this terrarium, but a symptom of my time here. Such a childish decision to rest my whole life on an unquestioned phenomena had left me waiting for my destiny rather than impulsively uncovering it like a toddler unwrapping a toy.
The front had now engulfed most of the foothills of the mountain I crested, and even the heat from this was unbearable. The wormy holes I tore into my garments had exposed splotches of skin to the element, and it felt as if several spotlights from the heavens above are prodding my vampiric flesh. The flames were almost a trek and a half away, and yet the heat was already unbearable. It was almost certain to me that my destiny here would be that of a cage slowly lowered into hell, letting demons and heretics brand every pore on my skin with their grotesque fingers forged from millenia of living in a kiln. My only other option would be to alight from the edge of the westmost cliff. A most ignominious act, a trial of no jury or judge, that will admit to myself, and the universe, that the only thing I was ever afraid of was to let myself assimilate to the statute of nature.
I stand there at the edge, letting my eyes amplify the infirmity of my will by languishing in the exceptional height of the drop. The breeze taunts me, egging me on like a group of my best relatives - an honerable pack of childhood rascals. My head now scatterbrain with a tornado, an orchestra from a city of church bells selling wristwatches forged from cheap quartz. There is no way out, not even through my mind.
I believe it is time to forego my virginity by attempting irrationality - I look up to the heavens. My chin raised, the only way I can think to repent is to stare god in his eyes and plead for his guidance with full earnesty. As I open my eyelids, I am graced with a sprite from a plume that could be mistaken for the pollution that is bellowing from the leaf litter behind. I feel as if he had blinked while his eyes were already closed, disgusted by my attempt at worthiness to flee my prison without restitution. He would scorn me for sure, I had already drained the soul of every one of his creatures. Would he prefer I endure a torturous disintegration? Surely not, facing the mirror is more painful! After all, I cast sacrilege to his wonderland, both its beauty, and its flaw. A sin most treacherous, an act from one only forgiven through sadism. You've forced my hand, I am scared, I think of myself not a child by hair, but at the marrow, a flesh only other can see - one that I can deduce from your silence! Take me now or forever be it known that-
THONK!
A pebble. Spat from his mouth, and landed directly at the center of my forehead.
I stagger back, and land on my rump. I cup my head with one hand, and notice an unfamiliar slime cross my fingertips. I hold my hands in front. It was blood. Never before had I sat as the prosecution to the sapping of my own life essense. I giggled, and my chirps then turned into absurd laughter followed by tears of relief. It was wholly ignoble that the greatest beast to ever scrape claw over skin would be that of a rock. I laughed harder, wrenching my diaphragm with each bout and letting the saline tears mix with my sweet blood. As I lay writhing on the granite, I begin to feel cold tingles, ones similar to that of having left your arm splayed awkwardly across the rock over the duration of a nightfall - except this was pervading my entire body. Had I been drained? I must see if I have been granted Valhalla. I rub the mixture away from my lashes and put myself at attention of the sky. It drizzles. Like ballerinas featherfalling, pitying my coarseness.
The rhythm of their dance intensifies to that of an Irish tapdance. A shower was forming within the thunderstorm, and in the distance I could hear the steaming of the cool droplets wrecking havoc to the front. I sprint to my feet to witness for myself the tsunami formed by god simply turning his shoulder to me. The front stopped marching, leaving a clear border between that of living and deceased, as if a sign so prominent that one would be worse than dunce to miss. I took a moment to realise that the tiger, bear, goat, and even the flowers may not have survived this inferno, that they were given eternal salvation from the thought of having to encounter such hubris once more. No more would they need to wilt. No more would they need to seek respite. No longer will they wallow in stench cast from another. Never again will they need to stare through that apparition. Neither them nor their mourning relatives of the west.