Stories count as art, right? I hope?
Either way, this was inspired by a very odd nightmare I had this morning. I'm very proud of it, but I'd love criticism and feedback on it.
Last night I dreamed of a boar.
The boar was me, was the embodiment of my fears and disappointments, the face of everything I could have been in another life. The boar was me, reduced down to the bare bones, to the primordial essence and in the seconds before I feared the boar, I realized that I envied the boar. The boar had no home to be cast from, had no reason or rhyme or regulation to what he may or may not do. The boar had instincts he could indulge; I have spent the past two decades suffocating mine down. The boar could kill at will, could exercise his obvious advantages; I have spent the past decade strangling down that knowledge under a yoke of self-imposed oppression.
Maybe the boar looked at me, and he envied me. In the ironic, back-stabbing nature of things, maybe the boar found himself enamored with rigid rules and stereotypes, harshly regulated and held apart by miles of police tape and uncomfortable silences. Maybe in those moments, the boar wasn't me; maybe in those moments, I was the boar. I was his promise, his failed secrets, his dying stars; failing to go supernova and instead just falling to wonderfully hideous, smoldering pieces. After all, as they will always say, stranger things have happened. Stranger things have always happened, and stranger yet will come. So what of us in the middle frame, crammed between normalcy and redundancy? What of us who've seen our faced our strangeness, slept wrapped in it and have waited for a greater adventure to come?
The perpetual middle children, we are. Waiting for a day that'll never come; for a resolution that will never hold up for more than five enamored seconds. Oh, we're living the American dream alright. And what a dream it is we're living, driving her straight into the dirt, eating ourselves alive for just one more fix. But this isn't about gods, or morals, or fallen gods and morals. This is about a boar.
In the dream, the boar spoke to me. He spoke in a voice like crunching gravel, like heavy boots ground over ancient rocks. There was strength in that voice, insurmountable and like nothing I'd ever known. There was anger as well, anger that predated words and terms, rolling over every word and breathing into the pauses between them.
"You know you're antagonizing, don't you?" He told me, that rock-cold voice growling venom in all the right pauses.
"You're not even real, I can't possibly be antagonizing something that doesn't really exist."
The boar laughed, a sound like avalanches and car crashes. "What is existence, boy? What is philosophy? What is simple, pure bull>-bleeped-<?" He butted the door that separated us, not truly trying to knock it down but playing mind games with me. It seems that everything, even the incorporeal and truly nonexistent, will enjoy playing mind games.
"What's real is what I know. That's why it's tangible, why it's called physical. The things that exist, truly exist, are real."
That crunching sound again, like one ancient heavy thing on another. "Then what of air, child? What of space, and time?"
I had him on this one, at least. Space, at least in concept, is a very tangible thing. When you walk into an empty room, can you not feel the vast expanse around you? The inherent solitude in the very setting, the silence almost perceptibly heavy on your skin, if that isn't 'real' then what is?
The same could be said on time. When resigned to a waiting room, you feel those hours ticking away, you feel those tiny divots and chunks of your life being wasted in a carefully-sanitized hell. I was proud of myself, of this surprisingly good argument I'd found under pressure.
"Ah, but what of things undiscovered? Does knowledge make something real? And by that effect, what of faith? Does assumed knowledge automatically make god real?" The boar chortled, and the most terrifying thing of all was that there was humor in that laugh. It was dark, and it was malign, but it was real, genuine humor. I realized then that the most horrible thing of all about this boar was that he wouldn't lie. Nothing in the ensuing mind>-bleeped-< was bull>-bleeped-<, and that made it all the more bull>-bleeped-<.
"God is a metaphor of a metaphor!" I screamed at him, my mind swimming with too much. "God is a weak man's crutch and a strong man's downfall."
The boar let loose with another laugh, one of those long and loud and entirely unnatural ones. I felt something slipping and I realized I was laughing too, my voice nothing like the sound coming from him, but somehow still recognizable as laughter. Everyone, I realized, laughs in the same language. Humor differs from person to region to country, but laughter (apparently) is all-encompassing. I laughed harder than I had in years, maybe in my entire life. Things suddenly seemed so obvious, so silly, so ridiculous. I laughed because here I was, probably having a conversation with myself. I found it funny, that I could almost be bested in an argument by a goddamn figment of my imagination, and then I stopped laughing.
Figment of my imagination.
The boar was mine.
The boar WAS me.
In that second of crackpot revelation I realized that those 'lost possibilities' weren't lost, they were misplaced. Those possible destinies that I'd previously thought impossible were just mislabeled and put into the wrong folders. The boar was as much me as I was him, which somehow made sense to me in spite of it's being a paradox. I realized that everything was paradox, the world was a paradox and everything in it both validated and dehumanized it. I realized that I was entirely full of >-bleeped-<, and at the same time I was a god; I was my god, everything was god, everyone was their own god. God ceased being a metaphor and the metaphor became a god unto itself.
I woke up earlier than I had in weeks, more awake then I'd felt in days and somehow more aware than I'd been in my entire life. Though the weather was miserable and gray, I felt warmth everywhere. I sat at a broken table, smoking a cigarette and staring out at the city slowly wasting away under its particular brand of cancer, and I realized that somehow in spite of that it would be alright. I accepted that things are unacceptable, that nothing makes sense and everything is relative.
