Muffled steps

From a journal of a dying man:
“A day and a night pass…
Dawn: It’s dawning again. The sky is slowly taking its radical blue tint, that unforgiving color. On the sidewalks lay rested a few cigarette butts and an empty bottle of cheap wine, ruins of a lost civilization, which was lost to its own languishing glory. Glory rooted in agony and agony rooted in apathy, which ultimately manifested as the presentiment of its demise. The people have swallowed so much dust over time that they believed themselves to be made of clay. But only their souls were made of clay, and maybe their faith…Their idols modeled after the same material. And what was left of it they used to build housing, small and confined alike, like muddy coffins.
Such was the materialism that defined them; a feeling of fatalism that barks like a starving dog in the air, only to reverberate back in hollow echoes. They indulged it, in all its denial.
Everything comes full-circle; every dusk is followed by dawn. Every moment is paid by another. Was there any meaning in it? Does meaning, or purpose depend on what you believe, but does that also depend on what you want to believe? Is there any inherent truth to the universe? All things are reduced to a moment in time, an interruption of infinity. My own clay soul caved in myself. It shattered, leaving behind a crying wound, crying with the blood of tears.
The order reversed, it was an impenetrable silence, and the sky closed to my wound, with all its majestic color and unforgiving blue…
Dusk: The wounded sun wastes in burning, melting the horizons, and slowly covering the lost footsteps left behind by a lonely traveler…The churches bells rang sharply in a clamor towards the distant sky. When all became silent, you could almost hear time passing, grinding away. And time is like a musical angst, a chasm ingrown in life. Every dawn was followed by dusk. Existence was to be integrated in the contrast. Just as light hides darkness, without removing it…darkness is always there, and just as order masks chaos, so does the ephemeral deny the eternal. Time is a musical angst…And those heartbeats that are no more still reverberate in echoes that have echoes in themselves, in infinity, like an organic spasm of the abyss, eaten by itself; A womb in which the cries of unborn babies are heard, fading away…”
Outside, a car honks and honks, as if in agony. In fact, the whole city groans a silent lament. It emits an almost bizarre tone of abstract reverberations…a regrettable incoherence…in an uncertain harmony. The acoustic intervals increased, and widened, diluting the incessant hum and synchronizing it to the weak beatings of his heart.
Everything was shifting towards the evening ambient, dissolved in pale colors and sounds…The labyrinthine streets stretch around the plaza, and the gliding shadows move cautiously. When the last, lost rays of the sun fall on the grey buildings it leaves them to the impression that they’re made out of wax, melting into the sunset.
In the crowd, a man walks by, wearing a green and out of style jacket, complemented by a brown hat, somewhat resembling a wounded soldier, marching forward. He has a distant look, like someone who’s gazing into a void. Aimlessly, the man wants to get his bearings, asking strangers:
“Excuse me, can you give me directions to…”
However, the frowning faces passed hurried by, not even sketching the simplest gesture of regard.
He was unsure if his voice could be heard, murmuring out of his throat.
This was awkward indeed, as he never felt so alone, surrounded by so many…
Glancing sideways, he remarked: “Should someone put a damn’ sign into this world…at least we’d know where we’re going!”…
Across the plaza, in a hospital room, another man, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and a spreading infection, was slowly consuming the last hours of his tormented life.
‘Soon…soon’ he mumbled unceasingly.
A fragment of her beloved portrait appeared to him…
“A pair of blue eyes that could devour the skies…” - That’s how he himself described her, in the poems he wrote for her, the blue-eyed muse. She drove him insane… Any gesture, any waive of the delicate hand, the little nothings that he would give up everything for…Like sharing a kiss on the river banks…and dancing together on Edit Piaf’s song “Non, je ne regrette rien…”
“Freedom is nothing”, she used to quote from Camus, “if not a chance to be better.”, and they shared at that time an amorous glance, in which upon meeting her eyes, seemed to him as if they were absorbing his very soul in them.
“You’re my freedom” he responded after a long silence, “You’re my temple, in which I confess my religion, you’re a phantom that haunts my imagination and my dream on which greater dreams are built on…”
“Treasure this moment…For in the instant…” he pauses, “It’s gone… It would only remain as an echo, in a distant galaxy, where the cries of unborn babies are heard…The cries of our own children perhaps...”
“You haven’t even proposed to me”, she laughs, “and now you want babies?”
“I don’t care, we don’t have to be handcuffed together to be happy, and treasure each other.” He embraced her in his arms so tightly, that he could feel her heart, beating in his own chest, a reminder that they were alive, so alive…And it was love they shared. The truth. Nothing more or less…Nothing you could put into words, or judge.
They were together for one blissful and fateful year. But she died last April in a car accident. A part of him died with her.
Now it was like he was going trough the funeral again. And the candles lit dimly his mind, twisting in their flame.
That day the sun shone, and the birds were singing their meaningless song, on a beautiful weather, very unfit for a funeral, he though. At least if it could rain a little…To rain on the flowers and on the mourning faces that were gathering there. To pour unto the black umbrellas, like the ones under which they first met, at the funeral of his parents, who also died, ironically, in a car accident…
His brother was there, by his side, at the headstone. When the burial ended, and the last pieces of earth filled the grave, he addressed him: “I know you’re pained with regret, but things happen for…”
“No”, he broke in, tears dropping down his cheek, “I wish I’d die in her place, but I regret nothing!”
The memory faded away slowly into nothingness.
The dying man would have wanted to go outside for a while.
It was in his habit to take long walks. It was a quiet, consoling pleasure.
The dirty sidewalks were littered with spittle, excrements, and mangled autumn leaves, mangled by the uncertain steps of passers by. Right behind the corner, on the left side of the boulevard, was the communal park, opening its gates towards him. The man had an awkward manner of walking. It was rather more of a briskly trot. He never stopped to contemplate anything, like most strollers do, and only rarely did he throw his head from side-to-side, nervously.
His steps would follow him. One, by one, by one…
Another flash illuminated his feeble mind.
It was raining…And once he took refuge from the downpour in a nearby cathedral. Its gargoyles seemed to let out a frustrated snarl…they’re damned forever to decorate the façade of a blackened church, as reminders of a prophesized hell. In the interior, arches rise tall and majestic, meeting each other in stony embraces. The halls are empty, imbued with an eerie feeling of abandon. The old stained glass and thin lead threads depict epic scenes from the Bible: the Fall of Man, and the murder of Abel by Cain…
A tormented past and an unknown future echoes in the lonely steps. As he turns his head, he meets the stony gaze of the Virgin Mary, her cheek traced with marble tears, crying for someone, something …that’s lost to us.
It was a similar sensation that echoed deep in his crumbling being.
He feared death, but the further away he was from it, the more he longed for it. After all, she would be his relief, and no amount of painful heartbeats could change that. She would be his savior and his executioner, his downfall and his apotheosis.
He hunched down, ears covered in palms and eyes closed.
Without realization, lips start shaking, as if reciting a forgotten prayer, praying to forget…
Repressed thoughts starting leaking out, incapable of holding themselves in - and the dying man wrote the last page in his journal:
“The poetry is dead…Atlas bore the weight of the world without complaint…It was his meaning after all, a thing that defined his immortal destiny. But we bear the burden of our own weight, on our own shoulders - Our purposeless actions too, followed by their consequences, as waves follow waves in the sea… It is a lonely, indifferent universe.
And if it starts to be too much to endure, like it sometimes happens, we are crushed under our own weight, like a beached whale, beneath a disdaining sun.
Men can be fickle in their faith, or much too certain in their skepticism.
I look down on them both. There is however a common “want” that persists: A thirst that can drive us to drink acid, and a sight that can make us wanting to gauge out our eyes. Yet it is somewhat undetermined. We could call it the absurdity of life…Mainly because we fear what we desire, and we desire what we fear… The Unknown. The Uncertain. The End. The Beginning. …And yet, after all, life’s not a problem of being or beginning; it’s a problem of becoming.