The Lioness
Two lives, two paths, lie in front of me. One, as a beaten and scarred lioness, is one of adventure, and bravery. Its open wounds and sunken face, regardless of its wonder and beauty, tell the story of my own triumph and demise.
I have walked the path of the lioness, and I have communed with her children, who run across the earth as wanderers and journeymen. From sea to shining sea, the offspring of the she-lion scatter and rage across the continents and cosmos, leaving fire and music in their wake.
Some of them take trains, or buses or cars, but some of them have only their feet to carry them. Carry them where, you ask — for what purpose — to what end? To nowhere, they reply, to the next town.
But as I, on my knees, stare into the lioness’ eyes, the eyes of my mother, I begin to cry uncontrollably. Because I have met her other spawn, them being my brothers and my sisters. I raced among the stars with them. Day after day, night after night, I ran with them, awaking to sunshine or rain, lack or plenty.
But as time went on, and my adventures began to adopt some aura of monotony, I noticed a sickness in my kin. Yes, the music was wonderful, the stories fantastical, almost beyond belief. But I heard talk of demons on the trains, and death, taking the children one by one.
So many I had traveled with, and so many I had left. So many places, nooks, and crannies hidden in the mountains, and yet I had left those too.
And it dawned on me, the sickness was in me as well. If I did not abandon the lioness, I would die like my brothers. I realized that this culture of freedom, was not truly free; that these minds were not wandering, no, not wandering at all.
They were lost.
Of course, it might be expedient to mention, that all the children of the lioness, were in fact, adopted.
We came to her in our hour of need, and she saved us from the alternative.
For the other path, which I am now at a crossroads, gave a seat to an Eagle.
The eagle is strong and mighty and was the biological father of us all. His pride, his arrogance, and destruction had torn our minds to pieces as hatchlings, and so we escaped into the paws of the lioness, where we built a lie.
That’s not to say that this was a pointless endeavor. What our father the eagle couldn’t do for our souls, the lioness did. We learned what freedom felt like and how to thrive in chaos, which, though sad to admit, is the nature of the world.
What the lioness failed to give was a sensation of home, or commitment. She did not offer us peace in the freedom we were granted, where we thought we would find it.
And so, after all this time, I emerge, afraid of nothing, a legend, but beaten and bloodied by the monsters of chaos, and life without a home, and without love.
I stand now, between my father and adoptive mother, ready to make a decision. I cannot return into a freedom that enslaves my people, but how can I find a home in a prideful beast, the eagle, that threatened to tether me to its inheritance of ignorance, real estate, and selling of souls for the sake of stability, for the sake of profiteering?
The road and the railways showed me much and proceeded to become my worst enemy — a deep infection in my being.
Fear has always been the doorway into greatness, and in the beginning, my fear of the lioness paved the way for its overcoming, and to become a man of many stories.
At last, at long last, the sun sets as I contemplate my decision, and the moon rises to remind me of her everlasting truth.
So I gather charcoal of remembrance and begin to forge first a blade, then armor, refined from the strongest alloys of stories and creation.
Fastening the steel to something deeper than my fear, which is now of this estranged parent, I walk to the eagle. I stare into the lifeless, uncaring and capitalistic eyes of the bird.
We walk together down the path, not as father and son, but as equals.
He will try to take my life, this I know.
But with my steel as my stories and my spine as my self, when the end of days comes, I will kill the flying scavenger, and I will have had a home and a family.
