The Man

I met the man. The eyes he had have seen the unseeable and looked into me. He never spoke a word of greeting but I saw his every word written across his face--etched there in lines I know are more ancient than my own handiwork. A well written story I had no desire to read.

"Abirl," he said to me, "You will never live. Not this way."

He meant, "Pride will be your death. In life you have nothing to gain."

It wasn't even a fact. If it was a fact I could have refuted it. I could have descried it. Understood it. Unraveled it to a nothingness where it would not have power to sting the immortal. My heart--if I have one--was outraged. It thundered within me like a horse on cobbled streets. {These things have nothing to do with me, yet I make use of them for your understanding.} It was a question.

I hate that man. If I can hate. If I can feel at all he is the only thing I feel anything about. No, I won't explain how I knew--knew what he meant; it's painful enough to just put this into words. I have never met someone who can see me. I often wondered what it would be like to be seen. (Now I know. It is the worst terror in creation.)

Not ordinarily seen like a sunbeam or scarlet thread against white cotton. That is only glimpsed, observed. I observe very little now, it is so--so uninteresting. I look. When a man passes me on the street he sees merely what I am--a boy with two eyes, a nose, a pair of arms and lanky legs studded with brown feet jutting far out from my rough jean pants. Even all this he will not really notice, though he might think he knows much more about me.

He, of course, knows nothing. For I see him. I see not what covers him and keeps him himself and obscure but the very depths and complexities of his inner existence. His soul, as people say.

The man saw me and I could not see him. He stood from his lofty purpose with every grain of pretense and power hanging over my impudent little head and I knew he could crush me if he wanted. He knew I knew. Still, he stared on, unfolding his power around us but never touching me. Not even a flake of the snow he shot around us in white torrents.

I wanted him to crush me. I wanted it to be over--this torture of my untouchable being, but he wouldn't relent nor would he release me to return to my existence. He looked at me with that disgusting weakness in his eyes that I scorn beyond any other weakness of the world and would find thousands of weak men who follow me in contempt. Some of your kind call it beneficence, others call it pity, and yet the closest your pitiable words get to it's reality is mercy.

Kill me! I growled without opening my mouth. it would be better if you did. I was defying him. I would grind his words into the ground.

He shook his head slowly lowering his head. My revulsion for him grew by the parsec. I couldn't see his terrible eyes but not seeing them, I dreaded what they might be withholding from me. I, who knew everything. Me. And for the first time since the beginning I had no thought for understanding--no comprehension of what he might be thinking.

"Abril." The very sound of his voice was grading enough to make me vibrate and shrink back. "There is still room for you in this universe. I have time to wait."

"Time to waste." I spat. It was the first time I had spoken. In that moment I vowed I would never hear my voice next to his. The unmeasurable distance between the two shocked even me. I had the greatest voice of all and it sounded like withered apples in a dry riverbed next to his. He deserved every minute of my unending loathing.

I know my words are incompetent--don't even try to reconcile these fragmented thoughts to each other--and I cannot have you understand. I am in the greatest--the only--upheaval I have felt in an age and an age.

Scratched on a ripped and burned parchment by ink pen in candle-light. I couldn't bring myself to the 21 age this hour.

~Abril