V. H. King's Ink

“That’s not how it really works on this side of it.  And—it’s not really sides, anyway.”

Puffy jackets.  Tall pines.

“Don’t go talking metaphysical geometry on me, Jeremy.”

“You just said that because it rhymes.”

“Maybe.”

“Quit it.”

Rustling in the underbrush.  A cold sip of water.  The river—audible but yet unseen—is colder.  Kent listens for birds.  Instead he hears humming. 

“It sounded cool.”

Chris shrugs, as if that explained everything.  For him, it usually did.  No matter how much—or little—sense it might make.  He elbows Kent, shoving him closer to the edge of the wide boulder they stand on.

“Metaphysics?  Seriously?  What does that even mean?” Chris shook his head.  “Nobody talks about those kinds of things.”

“Everyone talks about these things,” Kent said.  “They just don’t know what they’re saying.”

“There you go again.”  Chris jumped down from the rock, following his ears.  “Do you even know what you’re getting at?”

Kent caught up to him.  Talking it out along the way, which was how it worked for him.

“It’s not as simple as everything works out in the end.”

“That’s not simple, that’s optimistic.”

“And it’s not that you do good things now and you get good things in return—whether now or later.”

Kent stares into the trees.  Green-black even in the dead of winter.  In the middle of the night, made darker for lack of starlight.  The river is louder now.  Closer.  Kent smells the memory of summer silt and slinging mud, hears the insectile buzz that echoes the brightness of the sun. 

“Then what is it, whatever it you’re talking about?”

Life, of course.  Kent was always talking about Life with a capital L.  A regular philosopher.  Or a perpetual teenage existential crisis. 

“It’s doing and undoing an infinite number of knots.”

Heavy puffs of breath, white on the air.  Chris looks over at the sound in Kent’s voice.  That hoarse strain, as telling of tears as the fizzy warning from an agitated soda can.  Kent is staring at his palms in bleak horror. 

“If you mean the world is unravelling—“ Chris keeps one hand on the bridge’s railing and clamps the other on Kent’s shoulder.  “I’m not going to disagree.”

The wood cannot greet his palms.  It has shriveled itself too far back, deep into the wrinkles of its own grain.  Chris’s hand tightens on Kent’s shoulder. 

One day, Kent will recede into the whorls of his existence and Chris will not be able to fish him back out.  It will be winter, and Chris will come back to the bridge in the summer to mourn.  He does not know how long that will be, but he knows the day is coming.

“It’s like we’re stiches.  Threading ourselves—through one person and against another, as if we’re not all embedded in the same cloth, waiting to pass through the eye of the needle.”

“Ah, yes—less woe to thee, more woe is me, death our only hope shall be.”

“I told you, it’s not about sides.”

A deep blue vest.  A bright red hood.  Falling back into a pile pf leaves, brittle with frost and futility.  Staring up at infinite emptiness, feeling small and full.