MPI: Miguel
Con un dedo no se tapa el sol; pero con una pluma se oscurece.
No conflict around Miguel’s philosophy toward the pen ever arose. He knew exactly what it was from the day he wrote his first little dinosaur using words bigger than itself. The words were spoken out to other dinosaurs who could wield their own bigger and more dangerous words. Only they didn’t, not in that moment, because that little dinosaur was standing up for itself, and you never interrupt someone standing up for themselves.
He loved feeling those words pour out of him, existing within the page. Existence within the page was easy; it was whatever could fill out the edges. When his own edges were becoming blurred as he was lifted from the lily whites he understood and dropped into a yellowed tear with faded words, there was still the hold on his pen to interpret. He hadn’t been torn from his friends and school and favorite ice cream shop— he was on a quest! It was the turn of this tiny traveler to go out into the world and leave his own tracks.
There was life yet within the yellow. Dust was everywhere. It seemed to be the natural state of the place. One moment he was driving away from home, the next he was covered in dust. The car was never clean. No seat was safe in any building. The lungs churned the gravel to settle into the feet. It labored his breathing, tuning it to the harshness of a context where suffering is only the norm of those who haven’t learned the alchemy of whimsy.
He had a finer teacher there. The reason for the parchment. She was his mother’s namesake. Her feet had never moved past the peaks of the mountains he watched rise in the distance the first day they drove in. The dust didn’t settle in her feet, though. She learned to move it into her fingertips to carve. Sediments fed her sense of solid storytelling. They watched the watched those same dark mountains darken from the porch one day when she told him that idealism could kill, but it would spare one a soured life. Con un dedo no se tapa el sol; pero con una pluma se oscurece.
When he asked her why she’d never left the valley, she told him there was no need. She didn’t begrudge anyone exploration, much less discovery of other places, but always there would be someone envious of her view of the mountains willing to kill for the family she had. Her heart had never known worldly curiosities, only love for what she had.
He was proud of the stories he gave her. The stories his mother received with mild indifference that gave him the feeling of a world beyond the mountain. He couldn’t see it, but her words showed him. Her words would echo through his years. They taught him to cycle the sediments in his feet. To watch his breath pushed into the brisk nights when he watched a glowing moon set behind cold mountains between where he felt veiled in the warmth of her weavings. Every time his eyes streamed in the fruitless effort of reconciling pride and grief. He knew it the moment he understood what he had heard sitting at her bedside alone. When his mother had come in to relieve his watch, he denied. He had been in the middle of telling her a story. It had been the first she’d told him. It was the last she heard. The sound of final dust in her sigh would never leave him. His pain would soften the embrace of death.
Until then, however, he wood have to venture into the woods of the world to find where he would curl up for the great beyond. He hoped to, along the way, reconvene with what he’d been pried from all those years ago. How best to arrive without a map? What tools he possessed were cobbled together out of necessity and only just kept from rust. Calloused fingers and rough hands betrayed a sentimental nature. He had no destination and only a vague sense of direction. Good enough for the fog of life.
The chase of past silhouettes was an impulse. Pursuit of perceived academic glory misplaced. He admitted as much to his mother once he was finally convinced that the days had turned to sediments in his feet. What was required to maintain it was depleting him. Pages in the day became pints through the night after evenings of labor that was barely enough. There was no joy in it, no blood going to it. It made him recall the heft of a life urging him to drag it along, only this time it was his own doing. He couldn’t continue to choose it.
Returning to the pen was the comfort of an old record. It played the placid tones of memories that had once been reality. Hot days asking for patience so that cool nights without concerns could arrive. Melodies of youth renewed. The once immortal idealism. When had it become passé to retain hope? Used to be that the crashing noise of a day pushed through without cynicism would be lauded. He allowed himself to get lost in those tracks again. His eyes followed the ridges of raised skin in his palms.
Understanding how it happened was just as important as why. It took time to return to the excited soul that found sensations in every little thing. The how out of it as personal virtue guided him. There was no more shame in understanding the self to nurture instincts. Where he had once feigned disinterest in whimsy he now discarded the affected seriousness of those around him. There was only the next breath and the last, and to impede their flow with flat, uninspired notes had become anathema. Floating along baselines of impeccable pulse, the rhythm of freed interpretation elevated dirty twangs and precise plucks to the sublime. Now the guitar, now the violin, and to the surprise of age once understood through the conventional an accordion to elaborate what had been pushed away in favor of ease.
Wherever he could recall amazing scenes, that’s where his story should lead. Life was what his eyes took in; truth was what his pen put out. Well, really it was idealism, but his task had little to do with external interpretation. He didn’t seek the existential truth— there wouldn’t be much use for it. Eventually that truth becomes obsolete. He didn’t care about the ink on his fingers, nor did he want it to be true. If he had to know sadness and angst and joy and death and everything else that cannot be taken at ultimate denouement, then he would know them majestically. Everything would be monumental, given regal importance to rule benevolently within its own realm. Or not. Suffering would be damning, replete with storms on the sidewalks and Armageddon in a room. When the strike of love landed, it would be a sharp sickle to drive out anything not resembling inspired passion. The sickle pulled deserved the flood to follow. Anxiety wrought of misdirected boredom demands the finest distractions. If idealism was to kill him, he would carve his name on its skin first.