[ a . j o u r n e y . o f . d e s c e n t ]
by kHo

He calls me stupid white man, but there´s a smile to his voice that´s not there when speaking of other of my kind. I do not know why he seems to have accepted me, but I am grateful he has. I would have surely died in the pathway that he found me lying in, covered in dirt and dust with a gaping hole in my chest.

I am not who he thinks I am. He so strongly believes me to be, though, that I think I may have become so. A poet, a painter, a legend: it is what I have become. At least, to him, it is what I am. He is dead now though, or dying as I am, so I suppose it matters not that reality does not match imagination.

He speaks in ways I have not heard, talking around things and not about them. There is a tickling in the back of my brain that tells me that he speaks of wisdom that I simply cannot grasp. I try to wrap my head around it, but there´s a thick cloud that causes the meaning to evade me. It sounds foreign to my ears, though I know the words individualistically. Indian Malarkey I called it, but I think I am the one who is the fool.

I started on this journey a boy thinking I was a man, and it will end for me soon as I´ve finally become the man I believed myself to be. All my life I have been scared of living. I have been startled far too easily, scared off at the slightest menacing look or glance. I think it a shame that only in my final days am I to realize that fear can only exist where you allow it.

I have held a gun in my hand, and I have pulled the trigger. I have watched as a man´s face has registered shock after the bullet has hit, and I´ve watched as they fell to the ground. I watched a man twist on the ground, between life and death, and ended his suffering by a final blow. I have killed, and though it was in order to not meet the same demise they met, I feel that retribution awaits me.

My parents have died, my fiancé has gone with another, and now I am as alone as I have always felt. Alone in a boat, traveling to where sky meets water, to take me on my final journey. To take my soul, as Nobody has said, to where it was born and where it must rest. I do not know how far I must travel, but somehow it is relief that is filling me instead of trepidation.

The sky above me is so blue, expansive and unending. The clouds look down upon me, the sun shining on my face and keeping me warm through the misty pillows. The water laps against the boat rhythmically, swaying me from side to side almost as if rocking me to sleep. I feel as though I am in my mother´s arms again, and all I am lacking is a lullaby before my final descent from wakefulness.

The birds circling over my head are eagles, not the buzzards I thought they would be. I can´t help but wonder if they might be leading me. Turning the boat for me with their wings, steering it to my final destination. Finding my own personal mirror, where sky meets water, and I cease to exist. I wonder if I will feel it. I wonder if I will know it when it happens.

I am now a poet, a painter, a legend. An accountant, an adulterer, a coward. A murderer, an outlaw, a philistine. I am William Blake, and I am dying. Perhaps I am already dead. My only comfort is the thought that perhaps I was all along.