The Little Object

Something I put together years ago, refurbished to now

A useless decoration stretching the vastness of time, they embody the spirit of existing. Compliments of each other, they have no choice but to stare at the same scene, the same arrangement of time, the same location for as long as they are where they are. And the funniest worst part of it, they have no choice and no say-so in the matter. They are there because they are. Automatic placement where their existence is the unknown and our knowledge, to our irritation, cannot provide an answer to the origins of their being. An inescapable and unnatural mystery that the human mind will not be able to figure out. Decorating and defining apart of a body of mystery they have almost no relationship with except the one that binds them together. These irises see them as, well--I honestly have no idea, thinking about it. They are there, they fill space; we assume, not know, but reason, that they have no emotion. What if they have the most emotion buried in their matter? Huh? Useless, they very much have a use, small as it may be. We are just so consumed by our own existences, theirs is nothing to us. Useless? Useless decorations? Bah! I laugh at that thought, they carry our time. We come and go, they stay. They see it all, take it all in. And what do we do? --We might as well call ourselves useless. In the vastness of time, we might as well.

This was the tale my old man's brother, Foggy, told me, when I was a young pebble, twisting and turning about here and there on the dirt paths carved by the Almighty Himself, manifested by Mother Nature and, ultimately, made real by time. Uncle Foggy, "Mount Foggy" they all used to refer to him as, gave such a perspective on these things. I hadn't seen as much as he. He'd witnessed so much more, rightfully so--hurricanes pounding away, chiseling the surface of Mount Omahas, to show the depths she will go to to lay claim to what was rightfully hers. It all made sense, in her view. That was what Foggy always claimed it to be. I could never be sure. 

And such it was. That's how it went around here. The big, shiny ball that scorched our home for long periods always visited us in the same fashion. He went up and down. There was light most of the time from him. That, we appreciated. Occasionally, a feathery creature would stoop down to knock its sharp peck thing at my friends and I. It would bounce here and there. Peck. Peck. Peck. Then attempt to take away one of my friends in its pointy thing. I didn't know why. It wasn't something I bothered to worry about. I was stuck there. When it couldn't get it down, or felt it too wretched to swallow into its large, feather-smooth pouch, it let my friend go. My pal went sailing down onto its home turf. Where it ended up, none of us knew. We also had no say-so in that. We just went with it. Oh, don't worry, my friend didn't break or anything. It just ended up in some other part of the territory. And blended in. That's all it could do. That's all any of us did. There wasn't much more to be done after that. It was what it was when those things happened. 

Then, the rains came. You know, those big drops, big streaks of whatever wetness that fell from above. We didn't know much about them, only that when they started dropping, sometimes it was forever that they fell; other times, it was a shorter. They came with several of their similar-looking friends, all plastered together, in circular shapes and streaks of lines. What we did know, was that they dropped when there was this odd color coming from above. It wasn't the dark, dark black look we saw. It wasn't the clear, "blue" thing that we heard our talking visitors refer to when they dropped by. It was just a color--IT, the color. And when we saw it, we knew what was coming with it the moment it dropped its friends our way--those circles or streaks. They didn't hurt us much, if at all. In fact, they didn't mean any harm whatsoever. The most I ever saw them hurt us was when they started falling and didn't stop falling for so long, a few of us in the neighborhood grew some weird color marks on their outsides--and they kept growing until I almost didn't recognize my friends anymore. Weird. But nothing to be done. Not out here. That's how it went.

I was the small, rough and triangular shape that became the esteemed colleague to Martin West, the fellow who dared to defy all expectations by scaling that piece of Earth, hurling himself into an area where few before him dared to wonder. That area was only meters away from this patch of rock I called home. We knew nothing about him. We only saw him, occasionally. We figured he got some satisfaction from being out here with us. Something he couldn't find from wherever it was he came from. We didn't know, as that's how it went.

And yet, he seemed a decent fellow. Average person, I guess. Had some gadgets with him, for walking around our neighborhood--water things, climbing things, colors on him that said he knew what he was doing out here, among us. He wasn't dressed for an occasion other than being in Nature's realm. And he was decent enough to know that and be tolerant of that fact.

Thus, there he was. Scaling and seeking. Most of the time, as anyone knows, Martin was the guy you wished you knew more about. He was that guy in class, the one sitting there, knowledgeable about many things, but never caring enough about them to speak. He always received a 94 or above on most his exams. Thus, his classmates never gave him undue crap for not being a smarter kid in school. His grades spoke for themselves. On top of that, when anyone tried to bring him into the conversation, they would do so knowing Martin already knew the answer. It's not that they were trying not to look foolish, they just didn't always know how to go about talking with a guy who knew his stuff. It felt, not demeaning, but a privilege, one they didn't take lightly. They gave the guy props for being the wicked smart character he was, even if he simply chose not to gloat on and on about it.

Those moments were especially true in Mrs. Henson's Geography class. She knew he knew the answers to most the things they were discussing. She could just tell with him. It was that "insight" ability she had, like most proven Teachers like herself had. The one that just told her when her students were already knowledgeable even without asking a question or two towards them, even if it was just to see if they were paying attention, or who knows what other reason. And she could respect that about him. 

Maybe it's just his misplaced interest in physically being in a school building that had her confounded at his lack of wanting to discuss matters in her, and their, presence, she would always think to herself. 

When she confronted him on the matter, though, his response was about the same as always, "I appreciate your concern, Mrs. Henson. I'm just not one of those types who's going to contribute just for the sake of classroom discussion. I want to get to the true heart of things and explore, at levels of conversation meant for so much discovery that they make simple 'understanding' questions look elementary. I really want to explore and find for myself all those things that give meaning to greater purpose to why we are all here. Things like that. So when you ask me to contribute and I may say 'no,' I mean it in no offense. My mind's already concluded that, in spite of the need to test on some of this stuff to see if we actually know it or not, which my Tests already prove I mostly do, really well in fact, and you know they do, it's a matter of whether I want to know more about that topic or not. And, if it really doesn't appear to have much interest to me beyond what we're conversing over, I'm not willing to overly contribute. That's my perspective. So, I'll just leave it at a polite 'thanks, but no thanks' right now stance." 

"Again, it's nothing personal, or against you as my Teacher or anything, just a matter of deep-seeded interest."

And she did. Leave it at that. Sometimes the prolonged argumentative discussion was just not worth the hassle to have it, Mrs. Henson knew. And she respected it at that. 

And that's it how for Martin, for a while. Until he made his way to that Mountain.

West scaled those slopes as if they were his last ones to ever climb. He wanted to find God up there, or so he sometimes thought. He wanted to find himself in those scaled slopes. And he knew no one not near him would fully understand what he meant those years ago when he said those things to Mrs. H. Sure, he meant them. But, he also knew they separated him from his pack.

We all saw it, too. We knew, when he was kind enough to pass by our particular area of the great Mountain home to us all, something was triggering this guy. We didn't know; nor could we ask. Literally.

So, we let him be. We knew, though, Martin was a climber. And he was doing so because, and he was saying aloud to himself one day, "I'm here to find what I can't enjoy down there." He would gesture to the lands below him, where we knew he dwell'd. Yes, we would hear him talking to himself. 

"I'm also here because they told me I only have a few months to live. The docs. all told me I have a rare cancer. There is no cure for it. And it will be years before there is one. 'Too many other things to handle right now,' or so they always told me."

"Doesn't bother me, though. I came up here to live."

My triangular pals and I laid there, light up to light down. Up and down, one after the one. After a few more of those spins, Martin did not grace us with his presence.

That first light down after we didn't see him, the streaks and drops fell from above. With their visit, we all "agreed" to do the one thing we, naturally, could: let Martin's memory wash from us too. Such was what was to be done among us. All that's how things came to pass on our Mountain. We stayed, like watchers of eternity, until something came along and took our presence from that place, and allowed us to pass into memory.