Leaf on the water
I suspect that most people in their twenties are deeply afraid of reaching a certain age, say thirty-three, and abruptly coming face to face with the reality of failure. I certainly am. Imagine: you’re thirty-three, single, unemployed or still working a stupid job, friends have either moved away or are busy with young families, not much money saved, no real plans for the future, your best years as a mathematician behind you, your knees protesting a little more than usual when you run. To find horror we need not conjure fantastical ghosts and monsters; true horror already walks among us. Horror is not immolation in the dragon’s purifying flame; it is running from the beast, getting lost in the caves, and slowly starving in the dark. Thirty-three, indifference, boredom, the beginnings of decay, and an inescapable, permeating grayness.
How to avoid this outcome? Simply put: fear of failure causes inaction and reluctance, and that kind of fear is its own destiny. Instead, act, and keep acting, and your life cannot turn out gray. It may become yellowed by sunlight, or green like the grass, or streaked and mottled with your own blood, but not gray. Never gray.
I want to tell this kind of story, with my life; a story that is not about success or failure; a story that is whole even without its ending, in which each word on each page is its own justification.
The boy sits, improbably, on the lily pad. The occasional ripple in the still, dark water betrays his wakefulness. That the ripples are occasional betrays his calm. A fish breaks the surface and a solitary shaft of sunlight sprays off its silver scales; for a moment the trees are involuntary dancers in an unexpected disco. The water swallows the fish and all is dark again, except for the shaft of sunlight that misses the boy on the lily pad, falling instead on the water just in front of his silent figure. The water, of course, keeps its secrets; and the light fades to nothing within an arm’s length of the surface. Still his eyes flit over the water, looking for something even light cannot find. He shifts and reclines on one elbow; the lily pad bends slightly, but somehow remains buoyant, as if gravity were complicit in the silence of this afternoon.
A leaf falls from the high canopy above; it drifts and twirls, tracing disturbances in the air too slight to deserve the name of wind. The leaf is small, oblong, green life still valiantly resisting yellow-brown death, not knowing or not caring that it is now alone. A bird cries out, violating the silence, and the leaf, startled, suddenly falls the remaining distance. In the instant before it touches the water the water reaches up to touch it; the boy stands up on the lily pad; the sunlight brightens imperceptibly; and the depths of the pool seem to gather and thicken. But—the moment passes, the leaf readily wets and sinks. The boy, standing, briefly loses himself in the silent rhythm of the trees, before returning his attention to the water beneath. He sits down again on the lily pad.