the eternal moment

a story about when the pain you are in makes it feel like it was your whole life, even when you look back.

The Eternal Moment

Written by a grieving man

Blood splattered on the man’s soaking beard as his defiant smile left his face. The sun blistering his organs for they dared to leave his corpse. The chains that groped his wrists, and ankles, and fingers, and toes, and his mind had grown heavier with rust. Generations of rust. Rust that the world would never know in any cave or ocean or laboratory. It was purple, orange, and a touch of yellow and brown. The rust colored these plated ropes like how a child decorates the walls of his home. The rust gave the man hope. The bird gnawing on his insides did not.

He thought of how his entire life had been pain. He took something. Something important. Something he needed. Something other people needed too. The people he took it from had great trust in him, they told him not to take it out of the roots that had grown about it in their heart. Barbed roots that hugged it, that squeezed it, roots that never let it go. Roots that dug through flesh and bone, gray matter and nerves, Parasitic roots. He also had these roots, but he learned to maneuver them. He learned to let the roots accept an absence, and he helped them persist for long periods of time on crumbs of the attachment. His people were so unalike him in this way, yet they were his pillars. He loved them, and they loved him. That was why his necessity had damned all of the living. 

He stole the essence. Yes, that one. He took it, and on his way out he shattered what had taken a lifetime and unmeasurable planning to conceive. He stuffed it in his pockets and locked the door. He took it to one person, just one person had he sinned against the world for. Sinned against his mother. Sinned against his own code. Yet the pleasure it brought the two of them was necessary. A life could not be lived in sorrow by choice, could it? No man, no matter how noble, no matter how kind, could betray his own pillars for the ones he found and helped build. Though the man disagreed, and he felt a great weakness in knowing truth, yet believing himself unable to follow. He spent his life charting the map. A map of the world. A map covering all corners of the world, explaining the importance of each empty plot, and predictions on what it could do. He believed everything to be essential. He believed his actions necessary. He believed his pretended lack of guilt to be strange. 

He strived for change, he strived to increase the borders of his map further. He would, the map would grow and he and the other would follow the roads. Yet it generally brought him to swamps, deserts, towns of bandits, lands painted with fire and ignorance; yet, yet still, he marched. He urged the other to follow, telling them how his liver knew at the end of the road they would find a great kingdom, devoid of crown, and they would bear such resemblance to the holy monarchy that in their simple appearance would they earn the throne. It gave the other hope, but they still struggled greatly.

And the man had a truth he did not claim, a truth he buried beneath the toes of a mountain. A mountain that stood under the sun. If the sun blinded him, the pain would make him forget the mountain. The shock would occupy him with bodily urgency. As the eagle tore out a kidney he sighed knowing this was not the first time he had been tortured by a grieving man. 

At one spot the road grew too long, too tiresome, too formidable. The man found his father dying on the road, and he threw down his shield, then his sword, and then his heart. He told the other to find another, that he had been wrong. He told them they must part ways so the other may raise wheat and care for the future. It was far too easy for them to agree. The road had worn them down long before their uncontrolled choice. So they parted ways.

They now had to follow the road alone. No blade to hug their leg. No shield to guard their conviction. No wisdom to choose the next path. No love to drag along the road. They would both wander off the path. Simply walking wherever it was easiest for their legs to bring them. This soon brought them to the worst paths they had ever known. Paths they could not traverse, yet were forced to. Paths they could not bear. Paths that stole from them, with bandits and hunger, and desperation and pain. The man would find his pillar on the path, and he would tell him what he had done. The totem shifted a horrible glare and left the man with the unwieldable pain of knowing you hurt someone. He had been cursed, his heart stood dying. He laid in a puddle in the road, trying to drown himself, yet his body forced him to drink the muddy water, gulping it down regrettably. 

After some time of laying there, the totem would search for the man. They would reconcile, believing it to have ended in forgiveness. Their naivety would haunt them a mere moment later. The passing of the future trails proved so forgettable beyond anything other than struggle. The man would think of the other. And as he and the totem crossed a sign he would throw down his final dagger and tell the pillar. How he needed the other. How it was the only reason he could pursue the path. The totem loathed him for this, yet could not say no. They were each other’s other, yet in brotherly ways. One pillar now of nothing but guilt and pursuit. One pillar now of nothing but despair and betrayal. 

Regardless, the man would come to find the other. Ask them for the truth, and be hurt in doing so. And then he would tell his truth, every part of it, how adventure was simply a myth without them. Crying for forgiveness that would easily be given. Crying for the final forgiveness he might receive. 

They would take to the road with lost emotion. They smiled and laughed, they hugged and loved. They had not known it in so long. The man could have perished, as well as the other, if he had not simply spoken truly. And yet in the time to come he would speak truly again, to the totem, and this truth would damn him. He would be cursed again, as would the other. He would chain them to a rock. And leave them to nature, the cruelest puppet of all. They were placed next to each other yet could not often speak. A magnitude of pain that would demand focus unto it entirely. Fleeting relief. Yet this cage would have been unlocked already by the time you had read the paragraph. The pain was so great it rippled through time, changing law, changing order, it was a god of chaos. There was no rust, but only blood, and other fluid. There was no bird, but the talons of their guilt tearing at their whole being. There was never any plan for sorrow, but simply the unfortunate blessing of love.

The man knew this fully, and he still embraced it. He lived a portion of every life in this insignificant perspective. The man sought knowledge, claimed it, was branded by it, and he proudly displayed it. 

The man’s smile began again as the grip of the vulture’s talons lessened on his guts as it took them to its beak.