In the Eyes of a Civilized Man

I have always known myself to be a civilized man. Despite being indecent to my lovers and those around me, I have never broken the contract upon which society was built.

I am a man of high education. I studied the history of the world and pierced the greatest minds of our time, achieving henceforth a respectable position among the members of the law society.

I am also a sociable man. It is always a pleasure for others to be around me. I can sense it in their speech that they enjoy my crude yet comedic quirks.

It is safe to say, therefore, that I am a man who has overcome every obstacle in his way and achieved a life of grandeur. Such a man should be exempted from the judgmental gaze of others, but every time I step foot beyond the threshold of my apartment, I feel their eyes upon me, the eyes that watch and follow my every move. The people to whom these eyes belong remain silent and immobile, as if the rest of their bodies exist in a realm hidden from sight and sound.

But I can feel their jealousy creeping up my back whenever I walk down the streets. I can feel the weight of their judgment upon my narrow shoulders. I can feel the claws of their hatred gnawing away at my soul.

Yet I continue treading the same path I have always tread, longing to be away from the looks of these wretched creatures; these vile vermin who allow themselves to judge a civilized man, a man superior to them in terms of both mind and body.

As I now write these words for no one else but myself to read, I see the red candle flame flickering in the absence of natural light. I desire to live in a world where the ones who scrutinize my existence burn amidst the redness of hot flames. Then, upon their ashes I would build a shelter, and in that shelter I would forever reside with my thoughts and my books.

The burdens of the day now rest on my eyelids, and somewhere beyond the rim of the world, judges of mankind awake from their deep slumber.

I am too weary to go on.

***

I am in my room again.

I am seated behind my desk again.

The shadow of the candle flame dances on the walls and sweat beads form upon my temples. Something happened to the judges of the world, something that has triggered within the caverns of my consciousness a deep seated epiphany.

Days ago when I sat behind a table at the cafe, alone with important thoughts and ideas, I expected once again to be the subject of other people's hatred. Yet to my surprise, men and women and children passed the table without taking notice of my presence. After a while I decided, against my better judgment, to lower myself to their level. Instead of keeping my head down and looking at them from the corner of my eyes, I turned my gaze towards their path.

They still took no notice.

I remained seated in a shroud of solitude with my eyes affixed on the passersby, unaware that with the passing of each one, time was slipping through my fingers like sand.

Seconds turned to minutes and minutes turned to hours.

And when all efforts to get their attention proved to be of no avail, I called to the next man I saw.

He wore a black tailcoat and a grey scarf around his neck, his head bobbing to and fro like a demonic bobblehead. Upon first hearing my call he halted. Then came hesitation and the rotation of the head. Slowly his whole visage turned to my direction, and I saw that in the place where his eyes used to be, there were now two narrow slits sewn together with threads.

***

Through a pane of glass sunlight poured into the cafe and draped the stranger in a golden skin. Nothing moved save for the man's shadow upon the wall behind him, distorted around the edges for the final slants of sunlight were shinning onto his body from a crooked angle. As the sun struggled to remain relevant before the arrival of dusk, I realized with disdain that I had spent the entire day awaiting to be noticed by a blind man. I could have spent this time working on my new intellectual piece, an article that I knew was destined to change the way people saw their own reality. I could have remained in the same posture as before, with my head tilted down and my gaze fixated on the whirlpool of black liquid inside the marble cup, half looking at the world from the corner of my eyes.

Yet here I was, wasting my precious hours alongside this mole, this stain on the slate of human history.

Suddenly, in a moment that seemed to be just as insignificant as the second before, the epiphany within my soul surfaced from the depths of a murky pond. I saw particles of dust, thousands upon thousands of them, floating in sunlight. They were all suspended from invisible strings. They all contained within them the stories of days gone by, the suppressed sorrows of all the people who awaited judgment from one another.

Upon witnessing this tranquil and simple beauty, tears started to roll down my sunken cheeks. I sobbed in silence and looked down at my own hands, hands that had failed me all my life, and when I studied through a film of tears all the lines that crossed and intertwined upon my palms, I could see all my fears and insecurities gazing back at me. I cried and got up and stormed out of the cafe. Then I ran. I ran as time passed me by and stretched into an infinite horizon. I ran away from the blind judges and the sunlight, but I could not run away from the weakness of my hands. My chest started to heave and I could scarcely keep breathing. I could no longer run.

I stopped and turned around.

This was the second moment of epiphany, when I saw that the cafe was still right behind me, that I had been running in place for God knows how long.

And I realized that my legs had failed me also.

There were no burdens resting on my eyelids, yet I was still too weary to go on. I knelt down on the ground and tried to breathe. Behind the distant mountains the last rays of sun, red and dominant and tired, clung to the edges of horizon in a final attempt to proclaim their power. But I knew how the cycle of the sun would end, how it would fall from power each night for it was wanted on the other side of the world. Then I remembered that the sun was always wanted in my town; it was the earth that circled around it; it was the earth that voluntarily welcomed the arrival of darkness and pushed away the sun; it was the earth that was bound by the laws of physics, laws that told it to orbit incessantly around a source of light that called to it always, that promised to provide its inhabitants with warmth.

O how I now longed for one last moment of sunshine! How I longed to be the subject of other people's judgment! How I longed to be in their thoughts and in their minds! How I longed to be touched by their hands and feel the warmth of their skin transmitting through my own! O how I longed life, with all its strangeness and cruelties! I wanted to live, to see, and to feel! At these thoughts a surge of energy rushed into my heart. I needed to go back and talk to the stranger, to kiss his hands and tell him that I needed him and his premature judgments! Then we would stand in the same spot and argue for eternity about useless things, conscious of time slipping through our fingers!

When I turned around, however, the man was gone. The moment was gone. The cafe stood empty like a lumbering beast, hollow inside and rusted on the outside.

The sun had lost its battle with earth, and upon the birth of the moon I realized my own insignificance and powerlessness.

But in that final moment of epiphany, in that one moment of longing for the warmth of another's touch, I had felt alive.

And it is for such moments of longing that I will now live and fight for.