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I Found by ~StudioPhoenix:iconStudioPhoenix:

Categories Literature > Prose > Fiction > Philosophical


Oh, the beautiful banalities of this modern man.

Modern man comes home to his post and cries—but he cannot cry, really, or else his control is forfeit—he is the manservant of a merciless backbone, and to be moved to tears is to show that he can in fact be moved…

Never mind that he has no erstwhile control in the first place. To admit to tears is to relinquish the last and final piece of himself that is not ruled by the chaos of other.

He wanders in from the dark at an obscure hour of night, tired and beaten again into little more than pointless meniality—it is his bread and water. Those with souls are those without dinner plates in the dim horizons of his confined metropolis.

Somewhere he sees the ocean rise and fall like breaths. Is he a young man still, or how many moons ago was that? The last time he has seen the sea is his boyhood, before the eclipse of his self…

As he perches on the sand it comes to him, slowly, gently…like an idea that is suggested to him through the winding hands of an ethereal tide-maiden, a watcher from the realm of his lost self. He sees his spirit helplessly tumble the currents out to sea, and just for a moment he ponders what great loss it would be if he drowned in it, his hands at last clasped cold around the core he had lived in subtle undeath without.

He was with a woman that day, the one he recalls as he stands on the periphery of mossy rocks out to the cove. He has thrown his shoes aside, painful reminders of the hardness of his city, the city which is not his home or the place in which his heart would thrive. The woman. No, he realized, he was not terribly young anymore, and what had happened to her?
She was barely a face in his aching mind; just a flickering silhouette of truth that snapped him from the delusions of pasty office walls.

Maybe she was a dream.

He called out to his tide-maiden again, his watery muse that swallowed his ankles as he waggled sore toes and blistered feet in the sand like a small boy. She lapped warm about these trodden extremities, cleansing them of the base duties to which they were relegated; harsh, hurried strides through crowds of unfriendly human faces, hair-tearing and meaningless dashes to his cage for no reason but the elusion of spite. She forgave his hard-heartedness, his days of coarse mannerisms and wordless refusals of company and mirth. She saw in him twenty years of closed doors, closed windows, a closed heart with no room to spare; a true miser, a Scrooge of his day for love, and with tiny whispers of foamy damp breath forgave him.

For a singular moment there was no time in the world; he was peacefully no one in a way he had not been. For twenty years he had been no one because he used to be someone; in this moment where he stood in the waves with his muse, he was no one simply because he had always been someone, and now he had no need to be anyone, and so being no one was no great curse anymore.

The Man in the Water.

He smiled as he thought of himself carried away as seafoam on the wings of urban legend, the Boston ghost story of the ordinary man. He imagined himself quite literally—for one second he stood drenched in saltwater in his loosened tie and worn-out old suit, his arms raised high into the air as sea spray crept around him and transformed him softly into feathery drops of sea mist, as gentle and mysterious as the ripples. He cast himself in this new form high into the breeze, and as he took flight he saw himself leave the contorted figures of ugly buildings, scramble-plot housing and cheap condominiums where they would inevitably find his abandoned hoard of nothingness, and perhaps the television would still be on—stupid figureheads oblivious to his sanctimonious freedom.

He was plunged face-first into his clumsy human body as he spluttered on the sigh he would have used to fly away. He was deep into the currents now, the white flash of the beach remote and flickering against the view of rising water. He floundered but did not fight; his home was far from here, so far.

I always wanted to see Florence. I always wanted to… Let’s write novels when we get there. Novels, in Florence. To Hell with big business and T.V. dinners. To Hell with it…Florence.

~

He washed in from the blackness on the shore at dawn, fanned and pumped by stricken paramedics, and he did not envy them. He let them strike his drowning chest with their fists, let them jolt his slowing heartbeat with lighted mallets, and then he stood.

And he smiled; he had gone to the sea. Finding his memories flailing helplessly and crying to him to take them in his arms in the vortex of drowning, he went with them, and he had closed his eyes among them, his severed dreams and forgotten loves.

The woman was in Florence.

He was at the realtor’s by three ‘o clock, arranging to throw away the key to the condo.

~

-J.H. Redmiles
©2008-2009 ~StudioPhoenix
:iconstudiophoenix:

Author's Comments

Random short story that started as a first sentence.

o3O

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May 12, 2008
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