Jeff Coleman

What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

The same wind that bristled the leaves of the trees and whispered sweet nothings in Jared’s ears, a song of peace, a ballad of content. It caressed the tender flesh of his cheeks and face, ruffled and tousled his hair like a father or a mother, like a friend, like a lover.

The sky cycled through light and dark, periodic bursts of life and energy that pulsed like a heart, pumping life and energy into the world, which vibrated and tingled and hummed sweetly with the beautiful presence of life, a deep rumbling sound from deep within the earth that resonated with Jared’s own heart.

Wet paw prints adorned the sidewalk, brief photographs that would quickly fade like the afterflash¹ of a camera, echos² of a time that had ceased to exist the moment it had come.

Life speeds on by, like a dream. Though we feel rooted to the moment, to all the many trivialities and comforting mundanities, that moment is speeding, hurtling through time and space at the speed of light. Each moment fades and ceases to be as soon as it comes into existence.

The years melt and bleed, run into one another until they form a bittersweet alloy of incoherent half remembered³ thoughts and moments, an insubstantial haze made of moonbeams and gossamer threads.

A moment’s existence⁴ meets its end before our minds even have the chance to process it; we perceive not the Words of creation themselves, but only their echo.

Footnotes

1. I’m pretty sure afterflash isn’t a word, nor does it even make sense. Flash would surely have been sufficient.

2. Why yes, I am aware of the misspelling. Thanks for noticing 😉

3. That should probably be half-remembered. *

4. I ultimately decided to use this passage in a novel called Purely Coincidental, a dark fantasy for adults which I talked about here.

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What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

He thought of the dead, said a silent prayer. And as he did so, he asked his God for a word of protection against the souls of the damned, for such things did prowl the world, though encounters with them were rare.

We have finite length lives in which to figure out what the Truth is, and all the while have to fear death. Death is scary.

Is death the end, or just the beginning?¹ And if it’s a beginning, what kind of beginning? The beginning of Heaven? The beginning of Hell? Or just another beginning in an infinite chain of beginnings and endings?

I’m confused. I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. I have a mystical outlook on life. I know we exist in this world for a reason, and I strongly expect that we are loved, supported and protected in profound ways that we couldn’t even begin to imagine.

What is this life all about? Everything to us is surface and appearance. Most of life is but the thinnest of veneers, stretched taut and thin. That veneer breaks sometimes, stretches too thin and tears like paper. And what lies beneath the surface, what we hover over everyday without seeing, that great and terrible waging war between good and evil, it would freeze the blood in our veins, make the hairs on our arms and legs stand tall and rigid and erect.

Good and evil². Evil and good. What is good? What is evil? They transcend definition. They just are.

Good is love. Good is kindness. Good is patience, support and gentle understanding.

Evil is a baby left on the street to die. Evil is a baby punctured in the hollow of the womb and left to die. Evil is pain and wickedness and suffering.

Yet, what is evil but a counterfeit good? All that is evil has its origins in something good, because evil is nothing more than the great imitator. What is a lie but a modified truth?

Footnotes

1. This paragraph I actually edited and posted on my Tumblr as a writing fragment. You can find it here. If you’ve read this before, now you get to experience the broader context in which it was written.

2. This and the remaining paragraphs were what lead me to write the blog Does Reading About Evil Make You Evil?

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©2014 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.