The Art of Being Nobody

The Rocky Mountains took up the more significant part of his new outlook while the whirling world moved steadily through space. He could not feel the earth turning or understand the fact it turned with him on it.

He was but a spec of dust in the eons of time, writing his heart onto the page as if someone cared. How ridiculous to think such a thing. Some men come into the world, and their lives remain long after they are gone. His presence went with him. For a week or two, flowers marked his passing, photos held by loved ones before their children came running behind to ask who is that man?

Would a grandchild growing to be a grandparent, say of him: He was a man without history. His life went back only as far as he did, wearing old-fashioned ideas like a badge of courage, hurling himself at the world in a defiant storm. They said if he put his arms around you, you were protected from everything because he wrote his love by candle flame in his heart.

Will a voice in the future say that he lay awake at night, hour after hour wondering how to escape the reality of his life. A sleepwalker in the world, not knowing another soul so well as those lost to him. It was meaningless to utter the words ‘I understand ’ when his heartache kept growing, and he was going to pieces.

He could paint her eyes just so, fingers brushing the hair from her face, loves odor languishing in the bed past breakfast. Tongueless dreams of a heavenly presence felt so real to him that he turned silence into words as divine winds cast an ice blanket around their bodies.

Speak this of him when he is gone: His love was the flock of birds that graced the sky. His passion the flowerless grass she laid on that summer morning in June. In the end, his life was a vision, a fortress behind the ruined ramparts held one last wish. That one day, a ray of light would simply dissolve him.