Life

I knew comfort the first few months of my life. I was nursed in a litter with my brothers and sisters and I knew sound sleep at night. Together in bundles our mother would hold us in her arms tenderly and with such unmoving grace that we thought the world was beautiful and that life was something to be treasured. I've found solace many times remembering those months. The memory has given me a quiet grace that I respect and honor as if god himself was holding us in his hands. Only later did I realize the suffering that life brings, but I take it all in stride as I wake each morning and reflect quietly throughout the day, throughout the storms, throughout the cold and throughout the wind that tears at my spindly fingers.

I remember the day that mother dropped me. It was a cold day in early october and I had never known what it felt like to be alone but as I lay motionless on the cold ground afraid of the world I came to the realization that life was going to be a tremendous struggle. It's quite the realization for a youngster, no more than a year old to come to, but it showed me that if I wanted to dance in the breeze and find the quiet solitary grace all my elders lived, without any regret I would have to fight to make a place among them.

I saw some of my brothers and sisters off in the distance laying silent left alone in the same fashion as myself. Separation was a new concept to me and it ate at me like paranoia. I watched and said nothing as my brother was eaten by one of the strange ones. The ones that showed a complete lack of remorse that I knew I would have to learn if I wanted to survive. I wanted to hide to protect myself but I couldn't move and so I hoped. Somehow I knew I would never feel my mothers touch again. The sadness of that hit home when dusk came and a quiet snow began to fall. It was simple but the cold was also painful. Still, I could do nothing so I simply waited for it to stop.

Nearly a week went by before I discovered I could dig myself a hole with my first finger that seemed to appear overnight. So slowly i dug. It took a long time before the hole was big enough for me but when it was I pulled myself into the ground and waited out the cold. During that time I slept a new kind of sleep, aware now of the trials I would have to face in life. It was a long sleep, disturbed at times but peaceful in only the way a simple life is peaceful. It took me a few days to fully wake up but when I did I could feel that my legs and feet had formed quite substantially and I knew now I could have a semblance of stability. That gave me something to hold on to.

I only dared digging myself out of the ground when my arms were long enough and I could feel that the ground was now warm from the sun. I would come to realize the reality and significance of seasons with time but I was still very young and seeing this strange world with new and innocent eyes. It took a few days for me to clear away the dirt and to fully feel the warmth of the sun on my back and as I did I realized that this warmth was something I liked very very much. It reminded me being bundled up with my brothers and sisters again in my mother's arms and although it wasn't quite the same it was the closest thing.

The first few years of my life showed me the cold accordingly, but every time, the warmth always came back and I basked in it smiling as if I had just discovered the meaning of life. In a way I had because it's the promise of the warmth every year that I look forward to. It's my reason for waking up when the light of the mighty sun first crests the horizon. And I follow the promise that the warmth will always come back to wash me in the grace of the great blue sky. It's my motivation for survival.

When I was three years old and was able to stretch out my arms to catch the light of the sun I spent my days watching the elders. I watched how they moved and what they said to each other in passing whispers. It was never anything significant, merely hello's and remarks on how nice or nasty the days were. Aside from that not much was said. We all stood silently and solitary keeping to ourselves. For the most part we were a simple people and life was now as it always had been. Quiet and as simple as God had ordained it. We kept being who we were and nothing else. We'd wait in a silent reprieve through every winter until the days when the sun would beat down hard and fill us with light and warmth and energy to keep living.

I was 14 years old and growing into a strong silent man, the cruel ones came to the village. They trudged through, arrogant and defiant of the way things had always been. I heard stories of the cruel ones from the elders but no one in the village had ever seen one and the stories were mostly shrugged off as myth or parable. But that spring they were real. Nothing could prepare me for the pain they would inflict.

Starting at the edge of the village they killed the most of the elders and dragged them away by their ankles. For the adolescents, myself included, they started by marking us with ugly colors and finished by cutting off our arms. It was sickening but we stayed quiet and strong saying nothing as they did it as if it were some sick rite of passage. The elders were dead and gone so we only had ourselves to look up to anymore. Years after, we referred to that season as the darkness, not because the sun never came but because we had never known such brutal despair. It had been a long running idea that the cruel ones only did this for our own good so that we wouldn't burst into flames but I had never had seen or heard about spontaneous combustion. The elders had told stories of great fires to the north and west but since we had never seen one we figured that was hearsay as well. There was no way I could believe such nonsense. Those stories had always been to strike fear into the hearts of children. Stories of God throwing fire down from the sky to smite those who were being rebellious. Bullshit. Still the cruel ones continued day after day massacring and mutilating the village until ours had been ransacked and they moved on to the next. It was humbling.

I was an adult when I died. 42 years old and although taller and wiser I still felt as if I were a child. I had seen many things, strange ones and cruel ones alike that I now knew as creatures. They had been ordained the same right to life as I had and although they were free to roam and I was stuck where I was, we all had the same lot in life. To see things, learn things and survive to the best of our ability. The sadness I felt from being abandoned so early on had instilled periods of depression in me and I had always told myself during those times that I was ready to go if it was the universe's plan. I had had a good run. Still when the bugs came and ransacked me It was the greatest pain I had felt since the darkness and they were relentless. They had taken half the village already and despite my hope and prayers the day they landed on me I only felt sadness. A sick sadness that eats at your soul and makes you regret and re-analyze everything you had ever done. Wrong or otherwise. It was a only a matter of minutes before they started to bite at me boring tiny holes and then burrowing deep beneath my callused skin. The fed on my flesh and crawled through my veins until the pain had become so unbearable that I simply stopped breathing and shut down. I turned a rusty blood red and simply quit living.

From what I hear, the cruel ones came back a few months later and me and my peers that had been killed by the bugs were dragged away carcass and all. We sit separated now. in pieces. some long, some short, some fat and some thin at what they call the lumberyard. The cruel ones burn some of us in the dead of winter to keep them warm and with the others they build things like shelters and toys for their young. I guess this is ok. I have no regrets.