The Boy King

I had to talk myself back down from the heights; where I came searching for the mother I never had and the father that never had me. I filled the empty space they left with sex because it was the closest thing to loving myself — a trick the vacuum had not taught me. My lovers, baffled by this vacancy, threw up their hands and one by one gave up on the child who could not be loved.

So I gave my trust to art. To music. To poems. To endlessly re-creating pictures of the void. Painstakingly piecing together the shattered story of my existence. Art at least could not abandon me I thought. But then she too became a jealous lover: nursing my confusion while tearing the flesh of any that got too close. So I simply left. I gave up and walked away into the wilderness.

There I sat beneath the lonely mountain and gathered my healing in silence. And when hunger and solitude had purified my desires, finally I began to climb. Struggling past sheer cliffs and treacherous ledges. Wrestling with slippery turns. Sinews strained and determined. Wanting nothing more than to fall lovingly into the abyss and forget. My stubbornness and my self pity waged a savage war, and pity met its match. So I climbed on. I climbed until in a fitful sweaty dream I discovered that the thing I was seeking had been with me all along. I discovered the doorway back to myself.

And I was a mere boy. Thoughtful. Sensitive. Fierce. A child king. Running through the Caribbean bush with a guava branch scepter and a hibiscus crown. I had fought endless battles to surrender to this infant. I had come all this way to be exactly where I started.

Destiny, I learned, is irresistible.