Searching For A Light

Searching For A Light

With the eyes of the child he so wished to be, a look of longing flitted across the gentle screen that was his face, and for a mere moment, he was a child. And his thoughts were the same thoughts a child possesses in his meaty grip. And his emotions were tossed in the dizzying jumble that childhood exists as, and he found light in this. Yet as all childhood emotions and thoughts are, the light within them does not last, and simply fades in to the background as if they had never even taken place at all. Forgotten, broken, and torn, he slips back into the experience of manhood, and the world gets smaller, the light becomes lesser, and the goodness of life becomes obscured in the haze of adulthood once more. The clarity of childhood is forgotten, and he sits alone in a room that was once filled with friends. Now he only sees shadows of what once was, ghosts of people laughing around him. The realization of his separation ages him further. Stillness creeps its way into his already slow heart and he feels the lifelessness of pre-conceived existence in its entirety. With this silence, the splendor and pleasure of previous years is shattered, broken, and forgotten. None of it might as well have ever happened.

Yet, here he sits, alone, crushed by the experience of age. His heart is dead, broken in two. The first half died when he became a man, and the other half died when he realized that he is no longer a man either. When he finally notices the broken pieces lying on the ground at his feet, he knows that there is no way to put them back together. No power in heaven or hell can force the two opposing magnetic pieces back, they fight for two separate causes, and they are evenly matched in strength. He will die alone, broken, and forgotten.

His heart still beats, and his eyes are open, and air moves through his lungs. Although he performs the motions necessary for life, his existence only lives on the surface, and he slumbers like a great bear hibernating through winter. Like the bear, the man too will rise again. But where the bear will frolic in the warm embrace of summer, the man will fear its simplicity and will shrink from it.

The unpretentious brazen frankness of the warm sun is too good to be true, it cannot be trusted, so the man hides from what he needs to ensure his survival because he cannot fathom such complete goodness. The ancient bear-man dies alone, broken, and forgotten. He traps himself in this prison, only to awake as a child, with the thoughts of a child, until the dreaming dies and the harsh reality of life takes its place.

Apparently this confuses us, the race of man who rejects simplicity, but only pretends to comprehend complexity, so they exist in a limbo that perhaps does not favor one over the other, yet this idea’s complexity serves as it’s undoing in the mind of man. This realization, could it be a cruel trick of fate? A lesson only learned by time? A sadistic twist on what life perceives itself as? Or what we ourselves perceive life by? Either way, until the man begins to find his life in the mind of a child, spring will not exist to prance about in, as the bear does.

He will die, and he will die alone, forgotten, and terribly broken. Alone, in his misery, that serves as the most confining prison. He will be forgotten, living in his solitary prison, indistinguishable from the rest of his race. When this realization sinks in, will he be broken. His mind and spirit will be dead, while his body lives on, like a child’s little automaton switch that has been left on until the batteries die. Then finally, he, himself, will die.

Death seems to give him only temporary solace from the reality of life, until he awakens with the eyes of a child, and his thoughts are those children have, and he feels the light of innocence again, and all is new. Yet he can’t shake the feeling of impending doom. He already subconsciously feels the light fade a little, just for a second, and he gets a glimpse of reality. That minute dose frightens him, so he envelops himself farther into his innocence, but in doing so, only ends up exposing himself to the waiting adulthood and opening up to the pain of sequential loss that goes with suddenly losing the kingdom of innocence. He becomes a man in full. He knows what he has lost, and he thinks that he knows what he has, but in the idea of knowing, nothing actually exists. Because of his prideful assumption, he ages further, filling his need for light with objects and ideas and fanciful dreams. Of course, he doesn’t stay satisfied for long, so he just keeps searching for more fruitless sustenance. When he looks around and realizes that many of the objects he has sustained himself with are actually pointless, he falls into despair, and he has aged into an old man. His loss of light leaves him empty, and he now recognizes the trivial lie he told himself, and he is left to suffer.

Until merciful death takes him, or he decides to force himself onto death, he will suffer and his despair will hallmark the rest of his mortal existence. And in his realization of the familiarity of this cycle, he will not fall into the same pattern, and will instead create his own. Although he will make his own path, the complexity of his action will cause doubt, and he will never truly be able to achieve peace since he gave that up long ago. Only a new child will be able to live in the way the man wishes that he could, simply because this child lives with the knowledge the man could have never known himself.