ORGANIZING LIGHT
Book II: Contemplating the End of the World from Purgatory
Disclaimer: If you’re reading this, the world I live in is certainly long gone. It is likely that you and I have very little in common. Alas, perhaps this will help you one day as the world spins faster and faster out of control. It is distinctly possible that this is Purgatory, even Hell, and we are lost and set to repeat this, remembering more and more with each life, tattered images of the past flashing before us as we act, indicators serving no purpose - just the scratches of birds safe in their trees, posted along long branches. I will hold your hand in my own, as we will all meet again at the finish line.
I am samurai. The firefly’s tail screams along my blade, rallying against the night and it’s only the warm sake against my lips that keeps me calm amongst the wicked. They stand along the river, waiting for my flinch, as that will mark the end of us all - watching for our halos. Until that moment, I’ll enjoy the sound of water spreading down the mountainside, blessing the rocks below with perfect harmony...
…and with perfect timing my right hand slides down the last one's collar, my elbow wrenching up, the line a katana's killing blow, as one sword bests another. The mountain snow chills the steel into ice, and it glides through him, his life cut from him. He struggles in vain to escape, but the hold has taken a life of its own, writing his destiny, his ending, and he quietly slips into a peace that he will not remember.
Out of the calm for just a moment there’s her long, braided hair and I’m counting the strands along my fingertips, but I always wake before our eyes meet, so I imagine what they’d be. I know the shape, the color, the texture even. She’s a dream that I simply do not know. No matter how I turn her eyes will never meet mine - just before they do the dream will come to an end again, and I’ll finally hit the ground beneath the old, stained window from which I was thrown, from what seems like so long ago, years even. There’s nostalgia in the car rides I never really had, frustration in the dreams that weren’t. I will fall and bleed and the world will continue despite the outcome. I don’t dare forget to tell her that I think I love her and will come back for her as another dream starts, a brand new car sliding into a tree on Christmas morning, tossing us through sheets of glass into the snow, and here I am sitting straight up in this dream bed, wanting only to return, to get just one good peek at those eyes that have avoided me for eons, lost in this gallery of longing.
I could hang from this cross across centuries, generations spending their first and final breaths passing the totem upon which I was nailed. Reared and retired upon every last grimace. They say Christ was a message more so than a man - that suffering is masturbation at best and complete futility at worst because here we are, that's why I was sent. Every good deed I ever did, every promise I ever made and kept, yet here we are, scraping the bare minimum of empathy as not one person would stop to help me down no matter what good I did them or theirs across so many lifetimes, no matter how much I hurt.
I think about those sacrifices with every wounded breath as the next one comes upon his fate, that those breaths of sacrifice, of scared and somewhat sacred tension will turn to relief as he is delivered like all before him. That's a pattern, you see - like all those before him that turned their back upon a dying man too poor to shave or stop men from nailing him to wood. They deserve what's coming.