Aka’s Pilgrimage
Chapter Four
We are afloat in a universe in transit
A point in time is where we exist.
That point is infinitesimally small, and arbitrary. We exist, we create, we destroy and we cease to exist.
There is no final destination we can reach that will satisfy, but we do have a journey with some choices along the way.
Aka stared at the lights in the distance. The flicker of activity and the rush of lives being lived.
It felt plastic and distorted. Something glued on awkwardly. How could he comprehend the continuity of the world around him when his life had splintered completely?
Suri’s death had hurt him, but it was more than that.
He no longer knew if what had transpired between them had meant anything. And thus his reality had crumbled. When everything in life is transient, the only real things are the bonds we form and the meaning we ascribe to them. He closed his eyes and stared at the pages of time as they were written behind him, and it seemed they were no longer ones he recognized. He was a stranger to himself.
He opened them suddenly, with the manner of a decision being made. He stood up, got on top of the railing and climbed onto the small ledge outside his balcony. He stood there, and surveyed the ground far below. The weak morning sunlight struggled to break through the clouds. He put a foot forward and traced the naked air, and the immensity of his next action hit him. This was it, this is what his choices had led him to.
He closed his eyes again and took the plunge
Our time on this plane will always be limited, and it is perhaps from the kindness of fate, that we do not understand this till it is too late.
Aka did not have any such luck. He grew up acknowledging his mortality, but did not seem to fare any better for it. At the age of eight, he grew gravely ill and spent his school year lying on a hospital bed. The seasons changed outside his window, the crisp redness of autumn dulled to the pale frost of winter and there he stayed on, in his hospital bed, half aware.
Half aware that breathing was quite a chore, and that perhaps it would just be easier to stop for a while and close his eyes and rest a bit. Every night he came close, but his parents sat with him and made him count the days till his next birthday. That difficult number, through means of repetition, did get smaller and easier to say, and one day that breath came in light and Aka’s mom no longer had to hide the tears away.
When a child realizes his mortality, many autumns before he is normally forced to do so, a change is inevitable. Aka became a circumspective child, more so than before. His life fell into a pattern earlier than his peers, the regularity of his thoughts a comfort against the cold hail of the unknown. Aka would not acknowledge this, but Suri had broken him from this mold, made him rejoin the living and quit the early retirement he had chosen for his mind.
And then, as she had entered his life she had left, and a big part of Aka had been lost again.
