One action, one detail, one impediment at a time.
Time. Time hangs seemingly immobile as if Helios’ Chariot’s axle has spun a broken wheel straight out into space; and Phaethon and Helios struggle to hold their horses in check while servants pound and fit a replacement wheel from golden ingots.
The clock ticks but the hands seem to have slipped into counter revolution each tick adding to the barren time left to serve before the sun chariot slips silently below the horizon and nighttime falls as a shrouding blanket across the land.
Throughout his day he fights a constant battle to resist looking at any clock. A battle sure to lead to his defeat for modern man has embraced the passing of time as a religious zealot embraces the tiresome formalities of the governing cabal.
The time is displayed on his watch, stove, microwave, telephone, computer screen, television, business signs, busses, and trains. The newsmen and women chirpingly announce the time every few minutes to support the neon colored time display in the ribbon banner across their screen. Radios, schools, hallways, taxis, and all manner of machine are preternaturally focused on counting away the moments of each and every life on Earth. And worse, modern man has joined them.
Somehow, at some point, the grinding pressures of living move forward, pulverizing his soul in the day’s repetition of action. The wheel is repaired, the horses loosed, and the chariot finally drifts downward towards the quenching waters of the westward oceans.
As bright golden light fades through gray, he awakens from his sunlit comatose’s toils to recover and recharge energies for the peace that night’s darkness promises.
Once, back in the days of his youth, daytime seduced with provocative promises of what night would bring. Seductive adventures whispered harmoniously in eager ear, promising life and living in perpetual bliss. Her eyes then had depths unplumbed that promised passionate interludes rewarding the grueling journey through day light activities.
But just as the ticks and tocks of clocks everywhere usher change, so too did they promote the dimming of life’s inspiring glory in the liquid voids of crystalline eye until depth and glory, and summons fell flat, cold, and repulsive.
As darkness claims the land and living-less people gather to grunt simple useless drivel at each other while falling, lost, into the dungeons of flickering screen’s hypnosis. Computer, Video, Game, Television, it matters not; each contributes its own mindless oblivion in exchange for the lives of those who sit faithfully believing in the supposed nirvana of “Civilization’s Advancement”.
But radiant tube, colorful screen, holds no kernel of hope out to him.
So instead, he finds himself drifting with the patterns of the breeze like spider web torn from its moorings. Escape from the full light of day, the partial lights of houses, and the mesmerizing lights of colored tube and sceen, allows him to finally gain release of the pent up emotions that have wound ever tighter all day long.
Musingly he wonders how and if the day round sunshine of Artic Summer could be survived. Not by him he thinks.
So, cloaked in dark garb, helmeted by concealing hat, he is finally free to grieve the loss of his only opportunity to love. Few venture along the pathways and shores of the now dried up automotive rivers. And those few who do are too protective of themselves and their own reasons to flow with the whims of the night to peer too closely, or to make any connection.
Alien to the mostly mind-numbed souls of the artificial inside, he silently slides along the channels of the nights passing. Here and there a window covering gaps partly or fully; some by accident, some by alternate voyages seeking their own confirmation that life flows through their veins.
But he cares not. The wound that he has nursed for countless years has yet to heal, and thus, he cannot focus outside of himself. His night grows ever darker. Star after star having faded into the black fabric of nothingness.
How many nights? How many steps? How many tears and agonizing soul strangulations has he survived, only to still find himself lost in the warm meaninglessness that envelops him like love’s lost embraces.
Gravel, grass, concrete, asphalt; all surfaces flow silently behind his constantly endured agony. Each night he presses forth, seeking the individual threads needed to reweave a vibrant life.
Perhaps someday in the far distant future, some day as night releases its hold on the land, and the black void of night is pushed back by dawns first colorless night; perhaps on that day, he will have enough thread to form a new identity and his black void will succumb to the menacing emptiness within his heart, and he will be able to feel and hear it beat again.
Until that day, if ever it comes, he is simply a shadow of his potential, forever delegated to nighttime’s lands of lost lives.
©Copyright 2019, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved.
