#the cycles endlessness leads to hopelessness and it becomes very difficult to be optimistic | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

feelgoodache · 7 years

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Pyre Nation: Vignette

They come to feast on us when the sun dips low beneath the earth, cradled in the space between, until darkness descends like a shroud.

They burst forth, some stampeding, some in flight, and some hobbling in any way they can, hunger and blind urge baiting them forward like a carrot on a stick.

These monsters were born hungry and will remain so. Their appetite is a bottomless chasm that cannot be sated. They were born to prey and we were born to provide.

Can you imagine, knowing you're at the bottom of the food chain since birth? Some of my people go the way of ignorance and suicide, barely taking any notice of culture, religion or politics.

It's difficult to cultivate a worldview when your own tribe is slowly coming undone like frays on an old shirt. Fuck it all or die, or if you're one of the clever ones, you find a way to do both.

Some of us are sinners, some of us are filthy, rotten things, barely clinging to humanity, but it's our stubborn right to cling as long and as hard as we can. Fatalism and futile breathing, be damned!

We are here for as long as we can be. We will not cry, we will not beg for absolution. We will not surrender, not even in the twilight of death. Some of us are warriors and renegades, and some of us are artists and dreamers. The finite nature of existence hasn't quite stopped us yet. Why should it ever?

I used to starve myself for days, my stomach tossing me seasick with its siren call of alarm. My mind was young, confused and rushing frenetically from one stark reality to another.

My body was a game between my stomach and the emptiness holding me together. My brain understood perfectly, but the rest of me was busy rioting in vintage mosh pit fashion. I was sometimes so desperate to live that I fell asleep screaming and cursing fate until my body plunged, stubborn and slow, into an endless pool of slumber.

I lost my voice this way too many times to count. My mother, a quiet woman by nature, spoke very little about my outbursts and even less about abandoning meals. I would see her watching me though with a sad and hopeless expression, one I had memorized since birth. She suspected, or perhaps knew, that I was sick or defective somehow.

No matter what she actually believed, she preferred to keep it to herself. Sometimes I wish that she were more commanding, more domineering, more outspoken. I wish she were like my father.

He was strong, brave and never afraid to throw down or defend his territory if it was being threatened. She was, in many ways, his complete opposite. I couldn't begin to theorize or understand their attraction to each other.

Even at my age, I knew parents were once people who grew up, realized the way of the world and then reacted in their own way. They can try to impart some kind of guidance to you, but it mostly feels like the blind leading the blind.

Maybe they were both quiet together for a while. Perhaps something monumental, something they couldn't look past or get past happened at some point. Maybe what made my mother go completely mute was the same thing that carved my father from stone.

It's staggering, the effect and scope that something traumatic or destructive can have on the human mind. Some get better while others just look for ways to disappear.

Since neither of them spoke much of the past, I could only make feeble attempts at theorizing when shit fell apart. Ever since Luke went missing, there's been a tense, uncomfortable energy throughout the house. We all stopped talking when they brought his body home from the forest, so cold, so dirty, so wrong.

It was all wrong to me. He was the cops to my robbers. He was player one and I was player two. It was him and I, forever. My brother was a sweet, quiet young man who read often and recited hymns from the old texts for us. He begged and pleaded until we were all together, screaming out long and off-key notes at the moon.

He was a daydreamer with a good heart. He would sit in the living room and draw for hours as I laid gracefully against the sofa and watched him, colors dancing wildly through my soul. When he was brought home to us in that way, it felt like I had been impaled in the heart by a dull blade that kept turning around and around.

Here was my brother, my sweet older brother, The one who wanted to build skyscrapers and wrote poetry that never rhymed. I put my hand in his, as I had done dozens of times before on the way home from school. More than a brother, he was my keeper and protector. He had taken an oath to protect me as well as respect my mind and heart when in the company of others.

His hands and his grip had been strong, reassuring and warm. As I bent to take his hand in mine now, I felt very little of that familiar energy. He felt as cold and empty as a burial mound. In this stupor, he must go on through the painted corridors of his own mind. He looked asleep, as if taken momentarily by some unfathomable dream.

The cold sadness in my heart, the stabbing shards of ice that kept my eyes wide open for many nights to follow in a flurry of daydreams and nightmares that always woke me to the real world nightmare being perpetrated on me as well as everyone else.

There are many funerals in our culture. Death possesses a sort of energy, and given the somber winds that seem to blow, it can consume a good-hearted fool with every earthly beauty. Money, power, love, sex, respect. These false idols rise and fall on the shaky foundation they were built from. As I stand alone with my brother tonight, before anyone can dare touch him, I will do my best to bring him close enough to the boy I knew and loved.

I began by bathing his body, washing the dirt from his bare feet, mending the tender blows across his shins and ankles. Then I begin slowly washing his arms one at a time, my eyes gazing everywhere but the zigzag scars that plague his sweet body like an omen.

This didn't have to be my responsibility, but my mother refused to leave the darkness of her canopy jungle. Without leaving room for my father’s argument, I left my mother's boudoir and went straight to what used to be his quarters.

His hair, usually so handsome and becoming of a young gentleman such as Luke Glassman, was splayed all about his head. He was something of an angel, even now.

A fair amount of the unmarried women in our village found him to be worthy of daydreams and merriment. He was very pleasant to be around and would never deny a dance, should some sweet thing ever come his way.

"You never know when you'll meet someone who will turn you inside out and make you love them for the rest of your life, so why not dance?"

So here I am, gathering his long hair into a basin. I placed the basin below his head and drew the pitcher from the table. As if in a daze, I slowly poured the water over his wet, matted, blood-soaked head. I began combing his wild mane, an agonizing task that slowly because slowly easier as time passed.

I started washing his hair and working my hands against his scalp. The water in the basin at the bottom was red and cloudy. His wounds had been tended as best they could be, but there was still so much blood everywhere. In his hair, on his body, on his ripped clothing, all over his beautiful face.

I worked as much of the blood out of his hair as I could before I went to task washing his face. He almost seemed asleep.

"Oh, Luke," I sighed, letting myself sit for a moment. I was just so overwhelmed. "Oh, Lucas Robert Glassman. I pray only the most optimistic prayer for you, my darling brother. My valiant protector. I shall miss you fiercely."

I stood again, wiping blood from his forehead, his chest, his thighs and upper arms before I decided to retire for the night. There was too much sorrow in my heart tonight for screaming about anything, especially fate.

I could feel the anger at the back of my mind, taunting me with false highs and dead-end roads. Even in all of the despair that followed, I didn't want to lose myself. I felt it was something Luke would've wanted for me.

Stay away from temptation when you are brokenhearted, angry, or both. You will quickly find that rock bottom pales to what the pushers and the pills can do to you.

Life itself seems like an endless cycle of causes and banners to bear and people good, bad and well-armed to the teeth will be there, waiting for the world to end by chance. I carefully pulled Luke into his best shirt, a button-down blue cornstarch, which cleverly accented his ocean eyes. Seeing him cleaned up and in his favorite shirt gave me mixed emotions.

Where I come from, you're taught early that living in this world is never guaranteed. You could die at 8 or you could live to see 80. That's just the unpredictable nature of life and survival.

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