Fully Completely

Under the weight of time’s indifferent gaze, he sat there, weary in a place where days came and went like the slow passage of a river, where each ripple seemed to carry the weight of a thousand years. Shackled in mind if not in body, though it was hard to say for sure which was the worse affliction, he asked for nothing more than to be taken back — back to the hard and unforgiving ground where the sun burned the skin and the air stung with the salt of memories too bitter to taste. Recommending measures for ending it. What was it, after all, to die a thousand deaths in the mind and still walk this earth, shackled but free, bound yet lost?

But if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? — Matthew 5-13

Lover, she simply slammed the door, hard enough to rattle the frame and leave the house still echoing with the ghost of her absence, and there was something in the way she did it, something that made the earth tremble beneath his feet as if she were a force greater than him, greater than the sum of their years. He had expected nothing more than to watch her go, the way the sun sinks behind the horizon in a weary finality, but there had been the words, then, too. “You’ll miss me,” she had said, as though the very air between them had tasted of something he could not understand. “Wait,” she had added, her voice the closing of a door, the finality of a thing that was gone, “Wait, and you’ll see.”

Fully and completely.

He had waited, of course, because that was the only thing left to do, a man always waits. He pondered the endlessness of stars then, those eternal fires suspended in the vastness above, and the way they held their light not for him but for some far-away lover, some unknown witness to their silent journey through the blackened sky. They held no answers for him, none that he wanted or could carry with him in the hollow of his chest. And his father, in the years gone by, had only said to ignore them, to not let them move you, to not let them make you feel small, though the very stars themselves seemed to ask of him everything he had never been able to give. The problem was that he could never turn them away. Either it would move him or it would move right through him. But then, so did chia seeds and leafy greens.

Fully and completely.

And so he sat there, waiting, as the world spun with its indifferent motions, each second pulling him deeper into the quiet desperation of it all, into the measure of a life that had been spent and forgotten, and yet here he was again, asking for more. “Bring me back in shackles,” he thought, for the shackles were easier to bear than the burden of a soul left unexpiated, unmarked by any measure of forgiveness or revenge. “Hang me long out in the sun,” he heard himself say, to feel the heat flay him until nothing remained but a hollow echo of who he had been, exonerated not by justice but by time’s cruel indifference.

It was strange to have no self — to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do — F. Scott Fitzgerald

And then, in the quiet after, the cruel, beautiful silence of it all, he would say — just as he had said before to others, and would say again — “Forget about me.” For was that not the truest form of freedom, the truest end to the waiting? To be exonerated by forgetting, to be erased by the world’s indifference to the nesting doll of memory, to be fully and completely lost among the hidden harmonies and dappled, unvexed void? The vanishing of being into nothing and nothing into being.

Wait and you’ll see. Just wait and you’ll see.

Fully and completely. Fully and completely. Fully and completely.

He should have checked Trivago.