Chapter I

Chapter I

The sun sets for me. I am the epitome of definition, every act or move I make is delivered with exacting precision, conveyed with absolute faultlessness. My ideals of beauty, love, death, and life are the only ideals; the rest cease to exist at my whim. I breathe life because I am, life flows in my veins because I am, life will never cease to be, because I will never cease to be.

It was raining. The rain was surreal.

In life, everything, all the minor details in life that are so easily looked over, the imperfections that contradict the very nature of perfection itself, breathe with meaning and purpose. Only a couple hours ago, I had been blissful; only until I realized that I was a mark of nonexistence, a mere scratch on the marble slate of essence did I actually breathed the air of actuality.

Who am I? I am in an eternal state of morning, living life as it came to me, like a leaf brought down by the graces of nature to silt down through the wet, sublime, sovereign air, only to modestly sulk and travel alongside the sidewalk into a gutter, left to coexist with all the other rotten filth of society. Somewhat like a fallen angel, I thought. After all, even a falling leaf was obligated to represent meaning and order.

I lifted my face towards the sky and felt the reassuring sting of existence as the rain slapped upon my face. The rain. God’s pebbles of scorn perhaps, all guided down by the compelling pull of structure, all consenting to the compliance of order. Raindrops were conformists themselves; only aligning themselves to the composition of what nature allows them to be; falling, resonating in puddles on the cold concrete for the ephemeral moment of being, then rising up again only to be brought down by destiny. Order says so; a raindrop only has one fate: to fall from the sky and shatter.

            I turn my face away from epiphany and look towards reality once more. My coat, drenched, sags under the weight of sorrow and misery.

They must be God’s tears then, I thought with a chuckle. The scornful, miserable, tears of heaven glistened on my palm. With a quick flick of my wrist, they fan out into empty space, captured in that evanescent moment of being with bearing and elegance. I hold out my hand once more indulgingly and my palm fills again with small beads of water.

“Hey!” –I hear someone calling me, and I snap my neck around. As if being woken from a dream, I turn to face a tenement building, its refuse in its cracks evident still, even with the downpour struggling to crawl down and clean the façade, stopping every once in a while at the grime that entrenched itself into the creaks of every brick and mortar in between.

“Hey! What in God’s name are you doing?” At that question, I stopped.

What was I doing? I was simply catering to the moment, the dream that I have long since yearned for. A long exasperated sigh escapes from my clenching teeth from the bottom of my stomach.

I took three steps back to the tenement building, seemingly losing faith with every step I took. One. As my foot hits the ground, someone in the distance, a ghastly figure, turns to face me. Whether he notices me or not, whether he matters to me or not in my interest, whether or not I need to know him does not occur to me, so I ignore him. Two, the ashen figure, floats, as if it acknowledges my presence yet heeds me to ignore it. I took my third. It was twisted, and from the looks of it, its tendons and rippling muscles gripped its skin tight. The gilded aura I felt overtook my conscience. I felt the world in these three steps, the world slumped itself on my shoulders and although I was still strongly standing, the sheer weight buckled my knees, beckoning me to collapse, so that it could laugh at me. I found it quite interesting that my palms were already pressed hard against the ground. By my fourth step, I was completely engulfed in certainty, coming face to face with the distinct glare of reality. Those icy, piercing eyes, eyes that could make any man drop to his knees, eyes that cut the veins of a new dawn, eyes that held gripped the heart of even the most fearless man in its iris. And those teeth, the very gnashing teeth I remember hearing about during bible study, teeth that could chew on the souls of man, teeth that never hunger, yet feeds a mouth that is never satisfied.

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I glance down at my watch. It was an old thing, passed down through my family for generation after generation. Raindrops fell and exploded in their tiny existence on the glass. I couldn’t see the time too clearly. I wiped the rain off to see the time, and noticed a scratch, a seemingly minor detail, traveling from the nine to the five. I could deal with it, it wasn’t deep big anyhow. I had reached my home, and as much as I hated to call it so, it was my identity, my belonging. I was only ten yards away from the entrance to start with anyhow. I pushed the rotting door open, its hinges squealing, as if they too, were tired of life.

“You idiot, are you trying to catch a cold?” That was my brother.

“Hm.” He couldn’t even steal a glance. My mind was elsewhere.

My brother, quickly lost interest and muttered something, “…fucking rain, goddamn weather forecaster couldn’t read a chart if it…”

He was always muttering complaints. Always bitter yet never willing to break loose from the manacles of society. He was two years younger than me. As much as I loathed his personality, his complaints, his three-in-the-morning-calls asking me to pick him up at the on the corner of fifth and Alhambra, his complaints, he eventually became a part of me, like a leech or tumor that lodged itself into my heart. My existence wasn’t quite complete without him. I scoff at very thought of it. My existence.

I ponder about life.

As I took of my shoes, I imagined an aerial view of my life, from birth to death, the shallow graze on the intricate plane of life, falling in line with the many other blemishes, at times intersecting with others.

With some effort, I pulled off a boot from a foot, and peeled away a sock, leaving a damp, pale, shriveled foot in sight. I threw the leather boot off to the side. It tumbled and fell on its side, leaving a trail of water dripping out at the entrance.

Then I envisioned the lives the greats, Napoleon, Roosevelt, Caesar, Alexander the Great, Ghandi; deep gashes, leaving almost a wound, a gaping chasm upon the grand face of time.

The other boot came off with a tug and I shivered, realizing how cold the rain was. It was a pity the furnace broke last week.

I thought about the differences between lay between I, the meager pond scum of society, writhing aimlessly and barely scourging on dirt, and those who are remembered, the people we read about in those useless history books, showing pictures of their stone gazes peering into the future with that look of excellence, iron images coexisting in the past, future and present.

The difference lay in this: they lived, I existed.

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