The Answer to Life

I follow the path made eloquently serene by the beam of the moonlight shining down on the water. Reflecting, reflecting the source, reflecting new perspective, reflecting life, and reflecting my own intuition. I march on, scared of what I might meet in the darkness, scared of what might confront me in the shadows, scared of what the moon creates; the absence of light. Every corner, every streaking emptiness, there is darkness that awaits, sucking, purring, and waiting to pull you in. Waiting with sharp needles that stick into your skin like a knife in your back wanting to make you scream so loud, amplified by the wind.

I could only march on because I knew none of this to be real and maybe only a stigmatism of what I’d seen before. But my imagination was uncontrollable and imagination, it isn’t kind. An imagination that brought horrors and a damned point of perspective to my life. An imagination that would surely lead to my demise.

But I walked on, reflecting on all this just as the moon reflected in the water, just as the shadows looked around as I passed by them, just as my life seemed so hollow and empty in these large parts of the world. In these large parts of existence nothing really mattered at the end of the day. My life was nothing but a breathing apparatus that carried itself in such high esteem because of human likability and selfishness. All of that didn’t matter at the end of the day, all of that didn’t matter out in nature, all of that would be consumed by the darkness, consumed by the night. I betrayed myself to think otherwise. And I would betray you not to expose this, just as humans so ardently do; betray.

I couldn’t run from this dystopia that I’d made in my head. I couldn’t run from the malicious crunching sounds around me and I couldn’t run from the rustling of the trees, the darkness; a gaping hole in my mind. I couldn’t run from anything so I walked. I walked to the end, until I could walk no further. I walked until I understood every gravitational pull of this earth but all of this did me no good. This walking only brought me nearer to the edge of the earth where I would meet who I was. Where I would understand my place in this world--

No, it couldn’t be done. It was impossible there’s too many places to hide, too many standards to meet, too many guards to let down, too many creatures looking, watching.

I wasn’t the greatest.

Human kind would lead you to believe that we are the greatest but we are not. No matter what our instincts tell us, out here we’re not made to survive. We’re not made to look into the darkness and see beauty and wonder. Because instead we look in and it reaches towards us and tears us into an abyss of hatred and stupidity. I was complacent in all this. I watched it happen. I reconnected in my thoughts and I marched on like nothing in this wild could take me, like nothing in this world could reach me. But I was wrong, I was always wrong every step that I thought I knew something I found that I didn’t. They don’t teach you about darkness. I had to find the light on my own and as the moon shone on me I did find light. Not in the moon, for the light in the moon was just a reflection of the sun and not in the sun because the sun had left hours ago. Instead I found light in the careening depths of my heart and the crevices that were too far to reach. In the places only doctors or surgeons could look, deep inside a glowing ember that burned brighter than anything imaginable. Something that I could take with me forever and ever. A drive of passion that kept me going through the darkness even though I misunderstood everything that I encountered, even though I would never fully understand, that light pushed me through the arrogance of hope and the realisticness of hopelessness. That light was always there to guide me.

My journey was only just beginning and this was my life, this was the part that I couldn’t understand, the place that I sought to understand. A place where I wouldn’t learn, I wouldn’t grow. A place I had to step outside of the boundaries of love and support in order to define who I really was, who I would be, and where I would fit into this massive world. This massive cruel world of hate and destruction.

To find where I would fit, I had to leave the people I love. To find my place I had to break the hearts of people who cared for me and leave them behind to face my journey alone. I had to change. The scariest thing a person can face is change. But I had to face it in order for me to become who I am, in order for me to rise up and understand why I felt so important. Or why I felt the need to fill the void, to fill the hopeless and emptiness inside of me. Why did I need to understand? Why do humans need to understand? I pushed and I pulled at the idea but I would never understand if I kept this up. The need pushed me further and further away from the truth. I needed to just let go. If the journey was only beginning then there had to be an end. I sought that end and I would continue to search until I found it, until I grasped it, until I could hold it into my hands, until I could feel the end coursing through me, until the end was me..

You see, I learned from the reflection of the moon that night. Everything isn’t as it seems. Everything isn’t as apparent as it should be, sometimes you have to dig a little deeper. I didn’t want to take that for granted. I knew I would have to be more, see more, feel more in order to fully comprehend the capacity of my relevancy in this dark dangerous world and as I must relay to you: it isn’t just daisies and roses blooming, light waves crashing on a shore, and a quiet pond with a single frog hopping about. The world breeds so much more than that. It’s always looking for something to latch onto. Would I be that thing? I shivered to myself, not because of the cold, but because still as far as I’d come I knew not much more. I had to follow this path and I had to face these dangers. Alas, I was only human and this may have been my greatest weakness for I could only grow when I decided that there was nothing else on this level. We’re just like animals in that sense, they only proceed to the next level when they are forced to evolve to the changes of their environment.

We finally come to the conclusion that at the stop there’s nothing else because humans have a tendency to cling, to hold onto all rational ideas and traditional things. But progress is movement and movement is survival. Humans don’t have to survive, humans will die just as everything else, humans die and there’s no rational understanding of that because as I headed forth on this journey no one could explain it better. No one could hold it up closer and inspect it more fervently. And as I let go of all subjectivity and accessories that the human race had created and I drifted off into an abyss, letting the world consume me, and letting myself become the world, I finally realized the truth I had been searching for all along. I finally understood, we all die, everything that lives must die—our place in this world, my place in this world, is to die and that was the unsophisticated answer.