ORGANIZING LIGHT
Book IX: Resentments of a Butterfly
I never signed up for any of this, you know. There was no contract, list of incentives, signing bonus - I didn’t rest my head on my desk for an hour in consideration, coffee stains soiling my cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up in gentle waves no one would like. I just was, one day, and since that day the expectation became that I must do mostly good and nothing terribly bad or it all comes crashing down and I’m now in another man’s life, begging for change on the corner of some street so run down it’s pulled straight from some poor attempt at a trope because he had the same problem as me but went the other direction. But maybe he’s free. All I know is I sometimes liked sitting there watching the lot of them go about their days doing whatever they will and the consequences were rather invisible. I’d cry again, sob really, if it’d change things but I learned long ago there really wasn’t much I’d ever manage to change but me and even that is a trek up a steep hill becoming a mountain; this the highest point in all the land and no matter how many steps you take you won’t reach the top.
A lost angel quietly observes a man walking downtown, that which can’t even conceive it without its permission, drawing in every excuse made for his contemptible behavior in the memories it watches as its wings touch air and it sighs the way they sigh sometimes. I see the angel, nod my head in acknowledgement because I’m not of man anymore at this point and we’re sort of here together. I’m drowning in commiseration in the next memory of time, when I was of them. It was one of the first times I’d realized I couldn’t do true wrong so I must not have free will and that they must but that fate course-corrects regularly on their behalf and that my fate was inevitably both different and nothing good but that it meant we weren’t really free and stuck on a road we couldn’t deviate from, some more or less than others. I remembered how I wanted to be translated into whatever was next, and I sat on an actual hill watching the last sunset, reviewing the end of all time, all the while deciding whether or not this would be it and that I would go home, exact a razor from dad’s old shaving tool, and meet my ancestors and hoped while the life spun out of me that the first question I’d ask if I remembered all this could be, “why was it like that for them, and like this for me?” and perhaps get an answer that finally made sense and whatever was next was well worth the cost.
Near the end, still one of them, instead of leaving that hill I found my way to the first garden once, you know, and that’s where we met. There were suddenly fruit trees that went on forever and I’d never seen the creatures hiding in the fauna in any book ever written or drawing ever drawn. This is how I know, why I know, that it’s all ongoing forever. It was then I saw them partake in the fruit, the first true act of freewill, the first time someone did bad and the last time bad was punished as far as I’m concerned. The taste, they said, was everything. There was dew everywhere and it all felt like warmth. They left that day as they couldn’t stay any longer and as they did I was carried back. She wrote a note on my hand as they passed that started the first fire and the blood within me was changed. Whatever it was, I could read that it said, in such soft, curvy pictures: “return to me” - and as it all went dark she shouted how to find the way back and it’s a lost trail of breadcrumbs from the first tale ever told, so here I am, again, not knowing.
The truth is, as a younger man I never thought I’d make it too far, so after thirty there wasn’t really much of a plan forward - each day uncharted territory and the fire was always roaring. I had an old man carve her drawings into my human skin as he squinted and remarked that today was a good day, all as a reminder that with each passing moment and every minor mistake glowing to alert the hive, that all freedom ended that first day and that my resentment of every man that wasn’t me, his hands dirty from his daily allotted allowance of evil that seemed unending held no bearing on the ongoings of the cosmos. I look at him - me, from afar, and remembering her voice, her call…that I am to head to the garden once more, the marks on my hand leading me…following a trail of butterflies left long before me.