The Truth

A Story by Bobo

God meets Human. Which is which?

Up high in the deep blue skies lives a very old man. This old man is a well known old man, for in his lifetime he done many things and impressed many people. This old man has contributed to life in so many ways that even life itself can’t thank him enough. This old man has cared for, watched over, made love to, raped, killed, and given birth to an endless amount of living things and people, creatures and souls. This old man is loved and hated, worshipped and misunderstood. While some have tried desperately to define this old man, others have spent their lives ignoring him. None of them, however, have ever really bothered this old man. He is the most interesting man in the world.

Mainly, though, this old man just really likes to fish.

Now, notice how I’ve avoided the word love and, in this case, have opted for something much simpler. That is because, as the most interesting man in the world, this old fart has the responsibility of not giving a damn for just about anything and everything. For example, if his rod broke, he would probably grumble to himself something like “Damn shame”, and this would create an instant multiplied reaction in all the worlds of all the parallel universes where every single living organism would have nightmares about a broken fishing rod, and even those that can’t dream would mourn the loss of some abstract yet somehow symbolic object that they couldn’t ever possibly comprehend just because this old man almost didn’t even say the words “Damn shame”.

And the old man would partially notice this reaction, and would kind of think about the fact that his every thought has a distinct impact on not only everything, but even the goddamn concept of everything. And even though the responsibility and pressure and HOLY F*****G S**T feeling that comes with this great power is supposed to be unimaginably overwhelming for anything that has ever existed, this old man goes to the kitchen and makes himself a grilled cheese and has a beer and casually continues not giving a f**k as if the whole of existence is just a spider crawling around on the wall. And not even a scary one.

However, this would not happen, because this rod belongs to him, and he is way too important and essential to all living things to have anything belonging to him break. This man cannot afford to ever lose anything, because it would create a dark ripple in whatever existence itself is made of. Because of this, the old man is cursed: He cannot know what it is like to gain something, for he has never needed anything.

However, that is not a problem because he doesn’t really care.

So one day this man was fishing in the pond that is all universes ever, when he caught somewhere in the past an ancestor of man. The bait that the old man had used was knowledge, and the ape had taken it like it was a golden banana. Once the ape was done with his banana, he first question he immediately asked himself was:

“What happens when I die?”

The second question, however, was more like:

“ I wonder if Ape-ette would like to have some of MY banana?”

The old man, intrigued by the first question, wondered whether he cared less about talking to the monkey or about not talking to the monkey. He decided that he cared less about the latter, so he slowly reeled him in. The ape, now out of the pond of existence, looked back at it and realised that in the world, there existed not just himself, but also everything else.

The old man just sat there, watching the ape’s peaceful life get raped by intelligence.

Once the ape, after a undeterminable amount of time (actually, there was no time), had come to terms with the existence of everything, his eyes turned away from the pond and he was hit with another unexplainable reality: The existence of nothing.

This new development completely shocked him. He was speechless. Which was a shame since he had just learned to communicate.

The old man was, of course, amused but not at all amazed by the monkey’s discovery. The old man, who knew the truth to all, also knew that none of this really mattered anyways and, as usual, remained calm and composed. He didn’t, however, reveal himself to the monkey, because then the monkey would also know the truth to everything, and that in itself would create a paradox rendering the old man’s existence invalid.

Not that he gave a s**t.

The ape, now resembling more and more the modern man, in both a psychological and physical sense, decided, out of fear, to dive back into the pond. He wanted to find his old reality, the one where he never thought about anything, the one where he knew the truth to all instinctively.

As he swam deeper and deeper into reality, his thoughts began pulling him back, as if he had a life jacket on that he couldn’t get rid of, as if he wanted to sink but couldn’t. Once he ran out of strength, he slowly floated back to the top of the pond. He recuperated, then tried again, all in vain. He kept struggling like this until the nerves in his head literally popped, and blood trickled down his skull and his neck. Knowledge had given him an immense amount of fear and pressure. He was worried about himself and his purpose, and he couldn’t even understand why he was so worried. It was out of his control. He started to shout as the blood slowly began to turn the pond water red.

At that very moment, when the screams of the mortal pierced the ears and mind of the old man, the all-knowing entity was, for the first time ever,astonished. The old man had always known that his opposite, his rival, had existed, but somehow he had never known that the rival would cause him pain.

The old man has always known that he was the cause, and that reality was the effect. However, it was time for reality to bounce back, to become a cause of it’s own, and it was time for the old man to be reduced to nothing more than an effect. The chicken and the egg had switched places.

And so the old man realised that since he had created the human, this creature, it would, in turn, create him. They were linked and were a part of each other. Having caused pain to the ape, the old man had also caused pain to the only thing that he or any living thing ever really cared about: Himself.