Something To Be Envied

I watched as he circled and meandered. He was perfect indecision. Balance for nothing but its own reason. The lake flung cool damp air from belly laughter, and the sun crouched just below far away mountains, pausing, refusing dawn until he found his seat.

"Nothing's alive anymore." he complained as he poked the dwindling fire with the leather toe of his boot. "I feel like things used to be more alive, don't you?"

I shrugged, contented in silence. I had talked all night. Of life, of love, of war, of the very nature of existence and now I was talked out. Words abandoned my mouth like birds from a forest fire. All that was left, the burning.

I opened my mind to the last of night but all I could hear was saddened breathing. The kind that wishes it was about to say something good.

Some time passed, I suppose, but the sun had hit a snag and lay drowning in a wicked stream. Night had won and we sat wondering what life in perpetual darkness would be like. Our skin would pale and our pupils dilate. Moths would be driven insane from lack of sleep. Bats would line telephone wires, thinking, 'This is good, this is better.'

There would be no more shadows and people would learn to fall in love properly, without distraction. Touch would replace sight as the King Of Senses.

"I don't remember the last time I cried," he finally added. "Doesn't that seem like a terrible, terrible thing to admit? If i was truly alive I could never say such a thing. When did we stop being alive?"

I threw a rock into the fire and a small explosion of sparks filled the volume of space around us. It lit the campsite temporarily, then embers carried on to far-flung reaches of the universe. In their dying light I saw something small and timid nearby. It hid, cautious but so drawn to the fire. It did not care that the sun had been hunted down and trapped, never to rise. We were, for all our discontent, something to be envied.