The Personification of Night

The Wanderer

The wanderer made a livelihood on a deserted island of my making. It was a work which I'd cultivated and added to over many years—too many to count.

Long ago, the ocean was carved to make room for this meagre landmass. It was an agonising process: To let the earth fight for some greater significance rather than another piece of ocean floor. For what purpose?

I don't know myself. Maybe it was because the world itself wanted to accommodate the weary wanderer, tired of walking the celestial path within the heavens. His cries shook the oppressive chaos twirling above him. Maybe it was the tone of his voice, quiet, yet undoubtedly mournful, as it rode on the howling winds. Whatever the reason, be it sympathy or duty, I had no choice but to oblige.

Upon the island, he revelled in his small reprieve, and sowed the land with the seeds of his knowledge. This land—my heart—now overgrown with all he could offer me, and what I could sustain, had a place for him, and him alone.

The world Minato had crafted using the Universe Arcana was transient, and an illusion, I knew, but in the following years it felt like this reality was the security blanket I needed to get a good night's rest.

All around me was Minato's Iwatodai, embracing me with an open warmth; his warmth; the warmth of his heart. He'd recreated not only the glassy skyscrapers and the solemn factories, but his friends, and all the people he'd ever seen passing by on the street. The world also looped through the seasons, as his year did, colours morphing from white to pink to green to orange, and back again to white in nature's flawless cycle. Just as equally, the 'day' cycled from chilly morning to boisterous noon, to amber melancholy to the cosmic infinity of black night, and back again, as if his home really was spinning around what he'd call his gentle sun.

With no fear, but the tiniest, bitter aftertaste of shame, I would admit that even though he'd created this world for his own purposes, I felt like he also had a little bit of me in mind, especially as I watched the moon, hung up in the sky; the starkest and brightest celestial guide.

Truthfully, Minato had no physical need for sleep, or this cycle. However, it fed his soul the normalcy that it so craved in a world that was truly meant to satisfy an impossibly achieved lust. Or perhaps, it would be more accurately described as a loneliness that had settled in his heart, and since his separation from his friends, had begun to consume it like a stubborn parasite.

On the outside, as he appeared to me, he seemed fine. But with just a single word out of his mouth, Minato could not hide how the loneliness was slowly, but surely tearing him apart. His tone betrayed him.

I was his only company.

I was the only one who could see him faltering, and falling apart. In turn, it suffocated my being—his very own seedling which he'd unintentionally sowed within me.

Minato had given me many things over countless years, ever nurturing the sprout of humanity that had taken root inside me with the light of knowledge, and the water of emotion. Of the things I learned, I knew too well that the happiness granted by nostalgia was a cover up. You could say that you could enjoy the same memory over and over again, but how long would it take before you became numb to the feeling you'd attached to it?

It was the same feeling as listening to the same song on repeat. Eventually, no matter how much you liked it, forced continual exposure gave you nothing but anger. Or, perhaps more poetically, grief, as you mourned the loss of passion for the memory as it became tinted grey.

That was how I learned about the still pervasive futility and helplessness now sequestered at the back of my mind.

I am not human; I am but a being who happened to be at the right place and time to witness this boy's quiet suffering. Perhaps that was really all he wished for, however: For someone to see him as he truly was. Minato had already agonised over the bonds that he shared with his friends, but all he could do now was miss them, and hope that they were doing well (until their inevitable passing, for healing humanity's wounds was not a job for a single lifetime).