Smoke and Ink

The wooden floor creaked under the weight of the old man's heavy steps. It felt like the rickety wooden house would fall apart and break into a million specks, taking down the brittle skeleton of the house along with the aged, wrinkled man who lived in for ages. Who spent 65 years of his life devoted to writing his soul out. Every cobwebbed corner, every cracked glass window and every wooden creak had a story to tell. Mr. Lightwood was their voice.He had spent his life alone with the pen and the paper. 

It had been 10 years since he wrote something, since something inspired him to grab that silver pen on his wooden desk in the room that had a window facing the rose garden, and the sparkling water fountain, that was always a hymn to when he was scribbling on his blank page with overflowing emotions and a million stories of the past, stories of every crooked tooth he had, every wrinkle that graced his face and his hands. He wore them as a medal, as a souvenir of hundreds of places he had graced with his presence. He was old, his hands trembled, but his thoughts were steady. His brain was still functioning, and he had one last story to tell. 

He sat beside the lake as the sun melted into a thousand different shades of orange, like sugar melting into caramel. Writers block for the past ten years, for he was tired and hopeless. He thought his story had ended just like his life was coming to an end. When we are young, we fear death, for we fear not living life to the fullest, but the truth is life can never be lived to the fullest for life is only partial and incomplete till the very last breath. Man is such an ungrateful creature. He’d be laying in his death bed and would wish for another day just so he could see the sunset maybe one last time over the hill top he always dreamed of. 

Mr. Lightwood had the same school of thought. He sat there like he did every other day, lost in the thought of when life would detach itself from his body and he would lay there, lifeless and limp, as people would stroll by, without the slightest notion of the man in the mud. Or maybe the sea would wipe him off the sand, like shells, and take him away, far to the world of the unknown. 

His knees buckled as the heat of the sun shriveled his forehead. Sweat beaded his skin and the age spots on his arms gazed at the sun in bewilderment. 

“A beber y a tragar, que el mundo se va a acabar,” said the van bonnet parked beside him. 

“Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” 

Tomorrow we die. We die. Tomorrow. 

The water whip-lashed at the bare shore as the seagulls took flight, back home, for it was time, the sun was vanishing and so was any hint of life on the beach. The caramel was turning into a shade of gray, as thunder threaded through the gray like a thread stitching gray fabric. The ice-cream van engine roared as it retraced its path back to the dwelling it came from, where it belonged. 

The first drop of rain landed on his wrinkled cheek as he stepped into a puddle of muddy water. He unlocked his umbrella as its rainbow shades melted into one another like a tornado of colors. The rain fell on the tin roof of a shop nearby, improvising a tune of pleasure and calm even in the storm. A white Maneki-neko waved from across the road through a glass window as the steam of freshly brewed coffee elevated from the slight opening of the shop door. 

He married Bailey when she was only 19 and he was 21. It was like the beginning of his world as well as the end when she was taken away on an unexpected Sunday morning, in a car accident. They say love can make you do things you never thought you would. No, that’s not the truth. Its pain, it's always the pain. Pain drives the human creature. Drives him crazy, enrages him, ruins him. Or maybe constructs him from scratch. 

All those years in solitude, he held the pen and wrote. He found solace in writing, because in every novel there was a hidden character that depicted her. That was her and her alone. Her character was the soul of his stories. He talked to her, imagined her being old with him, wrinkles embellishing her olive skin and she always wore the turquoise bracelet he gave her. 

Her death had made him write stories, made him write beautiful scenarios of life like words beaded in a string of thread, delicate yet elegant. Full of life yet unreal. 

He walked past all the beautiful shops being washed up with rain, the scent of wet mud filled his nostrils as he took bigger steps, rushing home. Rushing home as time seeped through the holes of eternity. 

We die tomorrow, it had said. 

He unraveled the lock that had been latched for the past 10 years, the room with a dried-up fountain and dead roses. He tightened the woolen robe around him and ran his hand along the sharp edge of the wooden desk. It looked like it had not aged, unlike humans, except the layers of dust that hid its existence and animation. The case rested in the center. Just like he had left it, concealing a silver pen with diamonds studded in its nib. He remembered how those diamonds sparkled when he uncapped it every time, teeming with energy and thrill, just like the hands that held it. 

The chair scratched against the wooden floor as he slid in to sit. A blank sheet of paper crackled in his hands with excitement, as the flames of the fireplace, he just lit, danced and hissed as if to folk music. 

All those years he had written about someone, written about life. No one knew the man he really was; no one knew the man in torment and grief behind those smiling characters with olive skins and extravagant robes. No one questioned, no one thought who this person with the pen was. Who was he who wrote about worlds so alluring, they felt like a hallucination, a mirage. But for him they were never nonexistent, they were real, with all those enchanting streams. They were in his mind. Hence, no way they were not real. They were the reality, the real life, the life he had wanted, and he knew he would get. 

 This world, it's only an illusion, a masked serpent, an annihilator in disguise. Like a running stream that looks so tempting, so mystical that you can't help but step in. And when you step in, it swallows you whole, and you realize how dark it is in the depth. 

She was a blazing fire that had intensified. It blazed even brighter. He was waiting for his revival, his restoration, for this existence was only a lie and throes of incurable pain. 

After years of writing about people he loved, people he wanted to talk to, after forever of faking beauty and pleasure on bare sheets of paper, he unsheathed the pen, his weapon, as death roamed in the dark corridor, waiting for his dearest companion, the master of ink, to perfect his one last recital. 

He wrote; 

“Life is indeed partial, for we always think it is the end, however, the concrete world, the fathomless unfolding is yet to befall...”