An attempt at a short something
redmosquito10
Posts: 568
She looked at me and said, ’’The sun eventually sets on everything’’.
Looking back on it now, I can trace the impact that phrase had on my life like a fuse to a gunpowder casket. I was young, I was devastated, and I accepted it. The bleak immutability of the fact that in the end, the sun does set. We’re thrown into darkness, clinging to a flame, until our world is once again thrown fully ablaze. And like that fuse, I slowly smouldered, accepting that I too would pass into darkness, as would everything in my life. I had no way of knowing that all fuses exist for a reason, and barring malfunction, end in a bang.
To this day I dont know what made it happen. Restless, unsatisfying sleep had become the norm, so while I certainly wasn’t resting well, I was succesfully avoiding prolonged concsiousness in those most human of nighttime moments, when my instinctual vulnerability to darkness crept back in the form of uninvited thoughts and ponderings. But this particular night, I never slept. I recall reading an article, skimming a book, and looking up and seeing a digital 4:08 staring back at me, and realizing that for once, my house and neighborhood were conspicuously lacking in noise. The unbidden memories of my past with her crept through the streets I had walked so many times, tracing my steps from her bed to mine. Avoiding the same potholes, jumping the same ever-present puddles. I knew instinctually what was coming, but this time, I welcomed it.
I wish I could say I remembered it all perfectly; the truth is some events had been combined; the timeline was no longer coherent. But for me, this was us, and me at my best. And no matter how long I fought it off, eventually that night would come. I broke into a cold sweat as I saw her face as on that night. This I remembered pristinely, as if the events were eternally captured on film, there was no doubting that. I gazed at her with time trickling through my hands, as I desperately tried to maintain the watertight seal protecting ’’us’’ from everything else. The rusted gray Chevy slid past behind her,driver forever masked in shadow. Its wheels propelled the droplets of water upward and outward, the myriad miniature prisms catching the rays of the streetlight, framing her face in sparkling beads as she said those goddamned words: The sun eventually sets on everything.
But this particular night, as I sat in bed, hands to head, covers crumpled at my feet, obsessing over the inevitable thermodynamic death of us, of me, of the universe, a cold breeze swept through my window, causing me to lift my gaze. There was no instant enlightenment at the sight which met my eyes. In fact, those first outstretched rays of sunlight, representing the rising sun and the futile cycle, initially made me furious. This anger was new, though, and in stark contrast to the cool indifference which had come to define my existence. As I watched the sun slowly ascend, fraction by fraction, struggling to become a whole, I was struck by the illusion. The sun hadn’t moved at all. Here we were, simply spinning. The sun hadn’t risen, no, nor had it ever set. We had turned away from and back to it; a virtually unending cycle of rotation. And as I contemplated the nature of rotation, I realized that I was always bound to wind up in the same exact place I had started, perpetually tracing out the same cosmic loop. Unless, of course, I moved.
Looking back on it now, I can trace the impact that phrase had on my life like a fuse to a gunpowder casket. I was young, I was devastated, and I accepted it. The bleak immutability of the fact that in the end, the sun does set. We’re thrown into darkness, clinging to a flame, until our world is once again thrown fully ablaze. And like that fuse, I slowly smouldered, accepting that I too would pass into darkness, as would everything in my life. I had no way of knowing that all fuses exist for a reason, and barring malfunction, end in a bang.
To this day I dont know what made it happen. Restless, unsatisfying sleep had become the norm, so while I certainly wasn’t resting well, I was succesfully avoiding prolonged concsiousness in those most human of nighttime moments, when my instinctual vulnerability to darkness crept back in the form of uninvited thoughts and ponderings. But this particular night, I never slept. I recall reading an article, skimming a book, and looking up and seeing a digital 4:08 staring back at me, and realizing that for once, my house and neighborhood were conspicuously lacking in noise. The unbidden memories of my past with her crept through the streets I had walked so many times, tracing my steps from her bed to mine. Avoiding the same potholes, jumping the same ever-present puddles. I knew instinctually what was coming, but this time, I welcomed it.
I wish I could say I remembered it all perfectly; the truth is some events had been combined; the timeline was no longer coherent. But for me, this was us, and me at my best. And no matter how long I fought it off, eventually that night would come. I broke into a cold sweat as I saw her face as on that night. This I remembered pristinely, as if the events were eternally captured on film, there was no doubting that. I gazed at her with time trickling through my hands, as I desperately tried to maintain the watertight seal protecting ’’us’’ from everything else. The rusted gray Chevy slid past behind her,driver forever masked in shadow. Its wheels propelled the droplets of water upward and outward, the myriad miniature prisms catching the rays of the streetlight, framing her face in sparkling beads as she said those goddamned words: The sun eventually sets on everything.
But this particular night, as I sat in bed, hands to head, covers crumpled at my feet, obsessing over the inevitable thermodynamic death of us, of me, of the universe, a cold breeze swept through my window, causing me to lift my gaze. There was no instant enlightenment at the sight which met my eyes. In fact, those first outstretched rays of sunlight, representing the rising sun and the futile cycle, initially made me furious. This anger was new, though, and in stark contrast to the cool indifference which had come to define my existence. As I watched the sun slowly ascend, fraction by fraction, struggling to become a whole, I was struck by the illusion. The sun hadn’t moved at all. Here we were, simply spinning. The sun hadn’t risen, no, nor had it ever set. We had turned away from and back to it; a virtually unending cycle of rotation. And as I contemplated the nature of rotation, I realized that I was always bound to wind up in the same exact place I had started, perpetually tracing out the same cosmic loop. Unless, of course, I moved.
"Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH..."
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