One Day, in the Dark of an Endless Night

A person woke up, waiting to be fed. Do I need to tell you that he is a man? Of course not. Who else wakes up waiting for the bread of life to fall into his mouth?

Not all, of course.  But him? Always.

He will read this and feel vindicated. "Yes," he will think, "This is real."
He tells himself he is ready for real truth however it comes. As long as he is at the center of it. As long as it is spoon-fed onto his tongue by gentle hands. As long as he doesn't need to harvest it himself. All he needs to do is what he does naturally, shining as the planets spin around him. Wait, which is he, anyway: Sun? Prophet? God? So many hats. The burden is great.

This story would be of more value if it were permanently deleted.  Then it could offer no more of what he expects: wisdom dropping like ripe fruit into his open, sleeping mouth.

Forget the story, then; consider only the image. We live in a culture where the image says it all. Those of us who write ought to know better than to waste breath on words. But you work with what you have when what matters is what is true, and you get used to it, over time, the way no one reads. There's freedom here. At least there isn't the burden of attention. In case you had not considered the terrible heaviness of such a burden, listen to the man waking up with a spoonful of cake waiting to drop into his open mouth, if only he would stop moving it to complain.

"What a chore," he moans, "to shine so bright, with everyone taking."

Pearls of wisdom are still dropping from trees, whenever he's moved to harvest for a moment or two. Along with the waiting cake, the endless abundance, manna from heaven enough for an army of men while he cries poverty.

Now he will find it and think it is just for him.  Do you blame someone for this sort of thinking, when it is all they know?

If I were a prophet I might have an answer. I am no prophet and I am no sun, and I never imagined myself to be either. In this lowly state, all I can know is the endless black, one foot in front of another, and only hunger scraping against these insides at the end of the day, and at the end of every day, this gamble: if I give into sleep now, will it disappear?

No answer ever comes.

Except for him. For him they always come. I guess this is what it is like when you are a prophet, when you are a chosen one.

He stretches his hand out while he's still in bed, and Behold! The abundance of gifts in his direction is a fact as central as gravity, except he never names it. He gets more attention crying, or presenting himself as The Giver Himself, bright and central as the sun, shedding light on all the anointed at his feet. Groggy with the burden of fulfilling such a great obligation, he stumbles around. He can't find the light switch. In his disarray, he knocks over the forkful of food presented to him as it had been presented every day for the last thirty years. Every day someone rose early to bake him a fresh cake. He let it mold and waited for the party to leave. Then he cried about how hungry he was, and all of the recipes he meant to make, and how there were never the right ingredients on the shelves at the right time.

He remembered a tree, vaguely. He remembered himself, vaguely content with it. But the garden was long gone. What happened? Why did gardens always die? How depressing. And never any food when you needed it. How was he supposed to deliver all these prophecies to people when he was so hungry? It was so hard to be the sun, waking up every morning in the dark, the center of the solar system, expected to keep it spinning and lit.

One day it will happen that at a moment when he is yawning, the forkful of food that had been presented to him every day of his adult life, while he pontificated his daily complaints, will fall into his mouth. This will stop him for a moment.

"What a sudden gift!" he will think. "How appropriate that this should come now!" No thought is too meager to keep to himself. He is, after all, a generous god. Hence the sun salutations, the gratitude and willingness of so many, awaiting his pronouncements. Assuming he is the first to behold such a gift, he must proclaim!

Of course the same forkful of food has been presented to him every morning for the past thirty years. But if he were to accept it he would not be able to prophecy like the sun, and he would have had no excuse for his tears. Better to cry and prophecize. With duties like that, who had time to look?

 Such are the unanswerable questions one must bear when they bear the weight of the sun.

"Look at me!" he announces. "I am eating this food!"

"Look!" he says, finally grabbing the fork in his own hands. "What a discovery! I must tell the people!"

"Yes!" he proclaims, "Watch me as I shine!" Here is a great feat indeed. He finally clutches the fork.

But no one sees it, because everyone has grown tired of watching their cakes grow mold. He clings anyway.

"Look at me!" he says, "You thought I wouldn't come through, but look at me now, doing my part!"

And he sits alone in a dark room, chewing the first forkful of food he ever lifted to his own mouth. Surely the spotlights will come on soon. Surely the band will play soon. Surely there will be a great party beginning any moment.

He waits. It is dark. The darkness goes on and on and still he does not see. He weeps, thinking how sad it is that everyone is waiting for the sun. What a burden. He weeps into a pile of cake crumbs collected over thirty years. How hungry he was. How sad. How forsaken he felt, to be so neglected and unseen.


Epilogue

Don't worry. Weep not. Of course they will come. You don't have people showing up every day baking cakes for nothing, no matter how unreliable you are. People love their false idols.

They come, they bow at his feet. He talks about the struggle, how real it was. How grateful he is to have persisted.  How grateful that he had the drive and the follow-through to struggle through the desert wasteland.

"I have seen!" he proclaims. The crowd erupts in ecstasy.

Then there is a great speech and vast quantities of applause. It is unheard by the woman who shows up every night to quietly clean the mess of crumbs at his feet.  She throws them in the garbage knowing there will be another pile the next night, and the next, and the next. Probably the piles will grow even bigger, now that he has found so many more willing subjects. There's going to be a lot more cake now, and a lot more crumbs, and a lot more tears.

The trash bag is full again. What would it be like, she wonders, to live in a world where the trash bag was never full, and the question was not between cleaning the cake crumbs or sleeping with bugs?

One day, if she ever get's a moment less ripe with crumbs to clean, she'll have to ask the prophet.