The Anchor

The Sandman

There was once a man who lived a life without love. Nothing could please him. Not wealth, sex, or even religion. To him everything was a hollow victory. Nevertheless, he pursued more. His life became a treadmill, sprinting as far and as fast as he can, but he still ends up lying on his bed, an empty heart screaming at an empty sky. In times like these, most people would have a friend or lover that would point them to help. A passion that would engulf their empty mind. He didn't have such a guiding hand, everyone close he pushed away in hopes of finding something better. He traded late night giggles with friends for polite laughter at the same old dinner parties. Of course none of it brought him any joy after he had already spent the money he destroyed himself to earn. Old age was hard for a man like him. He didn't have a project he could throw in his face to keep him from seeing the mess he was in. Even as a wheelchair bound old man he kept pushing for more. Chess became his forte
even as his mind dwindled away it was all he remembered how to do. Game after game, it didn't matter as long as he kept at it and kept running. Alas even an independent man, eventually needs guidance and support. With the sum of all he had worked for he relentlessly cashed in his spot in heavens waiting room. Another chance came to look back and see the couples around him and join in their bliss. Another chance he tossed out and started to belittle fellow residents. He didn't like their smiles, with all their friends dying they still had managed to appear happy and find joy in the company of other or a good book. He guessed it must be sadder for him, with no young children to pop in and tell them of their simple lives, but he knew deep down it wouldn't changed a thing.

Before his fading memory destroyed him, his heart did. One night, a couple was talking loudly outside his door about the newest episode of a documentary even he wouldn't waste his time on. A bug was flying around what one might call his "home" sometimes settling on his forehead before flying of to be lost in the dark shadows of his rooms. The air smelled like rotting carpet with a touch of perfume someone unsuccessfully tried to mask it with. The sky wasn't black and stormy, wasn't sad or lonely, it was just a typical cloudy night. Then, it all fell down around him, the room, the furniture, his vision. He didn't see a fire consuming his sinful soul. Or a beautiful gate on the clouds ready to take him to a painless forever. He didn't see anything for that matter, just the static that comes from closing your eyes too tight. A picture so close to clear, but gone once he tried to focus on it. Black and colors he had never seen morphed together in his mind. Until he saw a tunnel. All around him were the walls, quivering black and white squiggles, halfway between a computer glitch and guiding arrows leading him to what he could only assume was the afterlife. With dreamlike logic, wherever he faced was the start of an endless tunnel. No matter if he looked up or down, left or right, or any variation between he was at the start of an almost identical tunnel. He didn't know where he was or what was going on. So instead he closed his eyes and tried to conjure up his happiest moment. Even a man so perpetually miserable as him was bound to have at least one, for no life can be complete without the tiniest fraction of joy, even if it is forgotten in the sea of everything else bombarding our hearts. For a short year he looked, suspended in time, to pick through his life day by day for true deep happiness. Then as suddenly as falling off a train, once speeding fast then rolling to a dead stop, he remembered. A perfect day where the sun was shining just right in the sky to bask him in a warmth nothing else can compare to, the birds chirped a loud and proud sons from the green trees. His mom tugged on his hand and they continued through the park, stopping to bend down and pluck a flower growing amongst the tall grass. He had nothing to do but smile at the silly punchline of a long story his mom, faceless in his memory, told him. After the day was almost spent, they sat on a rusted bench, although they could hardly care, and looked out on the shining pond in front of them. He couldn't remember a word of that day except wishing that day would last forever, that his mom wouldn't have to go back to the dreary hospital and he wouldn't have to start a life. Though time had fuzzed his memory into believing the day really was perfect, he was okay with that.

Suddenly he dropped from the suspension his mind was in. He spun down the tunnel in front of him until he dropped from the sky he dropped right to the body of his 7 year old self. A smiling, tiny version of himself. His spirits were lifted and he started to frantically look around for his mom, if she was still here, or if she was still faceless. Much to his dismay she wasn't there at all. He, in such confusion that would later crash down on him, ran around the park trying to scream in his high pitched voice for her. For anyone. He couldn't; not a sound came from his lips and not a single soul was around. He realized the birds of his memory weren't chipping anymore, they were dead on the ground below their perches. The people he was looking for as well, the bikes wheel still spun and a little girl laid dead beside it, the man by the ice cream cart upon further inspection wasn't gone, he had fallen behind the cart and would never get back up. There wasn't a bug in the sky, all had dropped from the sky. He knew deep down what it meant, and knew where his mom would be. The bench. She was there like the others. Face down so he'd never remember. In a panic his small frame tried to turn her head, to see her face and know. She wouldn't budge and so instead he broke down with young tears he hadn't had time to cry. Instead of asking "why?", instead of questioning how he could suddenly remember everything but her, he just cried. He could have cried for days but tears eventually run dry. People say you feel better after crying, he sure didn't. He had wanted to die in old age, life got tiring pretty fast, but now he was and wanted nothing more than to escape from this. This wasn't what he had wished for. He had wished to disappear, be gone from the pain and useless of Earth, not watch the only happy moment of his life be twisted into his own person hell. He didn't look up and try and plea with another empty sky. He looked down at his feet, stood up, brushed himself off, and fell into the clear pond. It swallowed him up in it's cool shelter. And so he sank, with his eyes closed, and missed the fish swimming all around him, he missed the bright corals on the steep shelf of the pond. Instead he saw the darkness of his own eyelids and started to prepare his mind for the pain that would come from opening them, crying out for help and having his lungs burn as the water swallowed him completely. It never did. He opened his eyes when soft brown sand grabbed him from his fall. A hairlike mess of tall seaweed blocked his view of the light shining from above. He looked over and thought that surely time must have been muddled with as he fell, into an impossibly deep pond. Like most people, he assumed something as constant as time, must have changed when it was only his perspective of it did. Time was moving as constant as always, his mind, washed away of everything he kept running from, had reached it's limit and he was forced to stop and slow down. The sun still blocked from his vision had already set before he could blink. His mind was empty except for the sand and weeds in his vision, almost washed clean with the water. His lungs filled with water when he finally needed air, but instead of dying his body welcomed the pond into his lungs and accepted its presence as one would a present. With a happy heart, another day passed before he could look over at his side and see the sand and around him and the green shooting up from it. Another day after that before he could look at his pruning hands. The saw the sand carried by an invisible breeze pass by his eyes. He even glimpsed a crab going about it's life and soon he didn't even know why he was at the bottom of a pond. Not long after that and he don't know that he was in a pond, for so long had passed staring at the growing plants around him, he couldn't remember any other home. Eventually the slow moving sand started licking away at the thin skin of his childish form. When he was little more than a skeleton the sand, filled the cavity where his heart once sat, and he was happy for no reason other than not knowing anything else. Even his skeleton couldn't as long as his consciousness. And that too was slowly worn away, by the pressure of the sand above him. By the time he was nothing more than conscious sand and millennium passed in what seemed like seconds, his entire life a grain of sand did he hear the plop of another body, that would eventually take his place. He knew someone else was happy in the same spot once was and took the same fall he would and would soon be happy for what would seem like forever. A with that knowledge his soul could rest and his mind faded away leaving only a grain of sand deep in the earth. Sand that would be joined by many other grains that had happened to be blessed with the same curse as him.