To the person who arrives with the sun in her eyes that we are the universe is no surprise. There is loneliness in eloquence. But even that over simplifies the things that they have kept lost inside the vortex between here and the edge of last night’s liquor.
You know this don’t you?
Someone told you about this on a bus going down Mombasa road but you didn’t take them seriously. Or maybe you took them so seriously that you couldn’t face it. But what truth exist in drunken whispers on a dark road?
No one’s sure.
Still, the search to be as close to the truth is one that began and ended with a question. A simple enough thing to do. The problem with questions though, is that some of them have answers. And some answers destroy. Some answers become the fire that consumes us and the stuff of our nightmares. The stuff that we see behind us. The metaphor becomes more vivid than I’d like it to.
The thing is, when an answer builds it lights a fire that can only be matched by the sun on a late afternoon waiting for the next performer at an open mic event – laughter. So it confuses them when you burn bright in the middle of the night as drunk men whisper odes into your ears.
Understandably, it burns their eyes. For how would you feel if you were just going around your business one night when there was a sunrise in your bedroom? Many people imagine that the sun is only a metaphor for light. If only the gh was as in laughter and the last t had another stroke. Life is only for the living, but what does it mean to be living where signs of life are quickly erased?
Questions, a currency that buys itself.
So what choice do we have left but to look for other people who burn with the life of the sun in their eyes? Hoping that somehow the collective force of sun searchers will lead to more. We are nothing but the products of our minds.
But all life needs the sun.
Even if only in small doses. Even though they don’t know how to bask in the garden on a warm afternoon. Even though they bask in gardens every day. And so you, like a plant, store the sun in your eyes, and give life.
Life.
But they have taken this life, piled it together and set a match. Using the energy from your embers to fuel their selves. You were okay with this at first but fire consumes. And the more they consumed the more they consumed. Soon they began to try and create their own sunlight. Which would have been ideal if they didn’t imagine sunlight as a finite resource. As opposed to searching for sunlight from the infinite they started looking for ways to get sunlight out of you even when you didn’t have much to give.
And now they say you have jagged edges.
Which is what that whisper on the bus had said all those years ago, but even he was not sure. And I see why. Being sure means knowing something, and what’s knowledge but a balance of several opinions? How do we know? We know, because we know. But what can that carry if now a burden to know more?
Know more?
Still, it’s easier to find the source of time than to quantify more. How do you hit a constantly moving target? With arrows that know what they are doing. The question then is, how do we create arrows that know what they are doing? By finding the sun.
To those that carry the sun in their eyes, that we are the universe is no surprise.
So, on some days, I take my favourite book and a chair, go sit on as close to the sun as possible, and bask, hoping to gather enough sunlight that I may share as much as you have.
But you continue to shine.
And I continue to bask.
We grow.
Thank you.
Signed
A dependent observer