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They call me Truth
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Life has a tendency of being elusive. Ever since I was young (or younger) it always seemed like no one had a firm grip on it. It was unpredictable, spontaneous, sometimes outright dangerous, and even though these were qualities that silly girls found attractive in men, it was not always the most attractive thing when it came from life, that had no gender, or age, just causes and effects. Causality. Chaos. Mostly unknown, shrouded in mystery; life raged like a hurricane and nothing could stop its path.
I struggled to grapple my mind around such a creature, not of flesh and bone, but of ideas, events, time, love, hate, happiness, sadness, meaning, meaninglessness, beginning…end. Was it a plague or some wonderful and beautiful thing given as a blessing? Was it in our control or did it control us? Is it our ultimate destiny to submit to it until it decides it no longer needs us?
A dead body on the side of the road, motionless, life already gone from the soon to decay mound of flesh, and someone finds it. The body is picked up, by people that pick up dead bodies. They pick this dead, let us say man, from the street. They have conversation. They may even joke about how heavy the body is.
It’s a necessary process, this selection, like a ride that must come to its end so others can get on. You don’t know this man. You have never met him. You may picture what it would be like to die the way he did, let us say he was shot, but you would never really know. You haven’t met death, and you haven’t felt the absence of life, or the feeling of it moving away from you. This massive creature that surrounded you always, how could you imagine the absence of it? But the process is necessary is it not? New people. New lives. New experiences. Time eliminates individual life so that the entity can continue to exist. Life must feed off its parts so that it can sustain itself.
We are built to be destroyed. We are cattle rounded up so that we can feed the greater mechanic, the controller, the creator of our lives. We have purpose. Our purpose is to be born and die and in the middle wonder about the two. Our purpose is to be ignorant, to not know, to fill our heads with dreams and beliefs, with religions and stacks of paper that tell us how to live life, so that we may be rewarded, somehow, somewhere in the future after. Does such a future exist? There is a deep possibility, a looming fear, an endless deep reservoir of uncertainty that life creates. And why does this creature do this, so that we have no choice but to waste our days on the trivial things because the big things are so vague, so that we can drive ourselves crazy with illusions of right and wrong, so that in the end we can curl into our own heaping mass of cells and chemicals and just die?
The jackal rests on the side of the road, howling into the night, shrouded in darkness, staring up at the crescent moon. The moon’s light is a lullaby that caresses and comforts. Who knows of the light in this world and why so many prefer it to the darkness. The jackal howls. The cavern of earth echoes the sound and lets it travel until the ripples are too weak to sustain themselves. In the twilight, the quiet void, the beautiful velvet black sky, trickled with softer lights called stars, the jackal eases his mind. Life is beautiful. So many struggle to find that beauty. So many die never finding it.
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