answers
I wonder about humankind, and where it will end up. Sometimes I go to a place in my head where I know all the answers, and I can ask al the questions. Perhaps it is society that prohibits me from asking these questions in the true world, but perhaps it’s only me. I like to blame society, for, after all, who willingly blames themselves for such a trivial fault? Not to mention, although I may view it as my personal fault, society views it as a virtue. Some questions are simply not meant to be asked, and others simply not meant to be answered.
While many of these questions I ask in my head retain no personal relevance to my life, I find myself asking more and more of them. I ask what would have happened if Hitler had died at birth, and if our officials today could build a time machine, would they have gone back and prohibited the birth, avoided possibly the second world war altogether? An obvious answer would be yes, but I wonder about the obvious sometimes. It’s not that I question what is given and handed me, but I sometimes question the faith and eagerness with which we all confirm to being good and pure at heart.
A possibility which led me to question that all-knowing voice in my head and ask: am I good and pure at heart? The fortune teller in my mind shook her head sadly. No, she answered, no you are not. You try to be good, and wish you were pure at heart, but you are not. It’s not a flaw in character, but it was what separates you from the animals. Instincts of the animals tell them to be good, to only kill to eat, only hurt to protect, but human instincts are different. I accepted this answer without question, and display no shame in repeating the answer dozens of times over to anyone who will trouble themselves to listen and many who will not. Another character flaw.
However, one burning question, one unanswered inquiry that plagued me throughout the past several years of my life, I asked this fortune-teller in my mind. I asked, “Am I going to die?” She, in response, smiled and said Naturally. Quickly realizing my mistake I corrected it: “Am I going to die young?” Once again, the wise face fell and she looked sad. There will come a time when new discoveries and new experiments of western medicine will excite a great deal of hope in your soul. Things will begin to get better, but then they will get worse. The wisest of doctors will sigh and, defeated, tell you that there is no longer hope. You, too, shall lose hope. The time of your death will come, and it will go, but you shall not die. I carry that answer with me wherever I go now. Perchance this will all occur soon, within this next year, possibly it will stretch over the next decade. I do not know. I did not ask. I merely accepted the answer as handed to me and, through sheer luck, granted.
It’s a foggy room, through a door I have often seen in my wake yet never entered. The walls are draped in thick and light tapestries. More rugs are thrown on the floors than should have been allowed, and overlap one another mercilessly so that the patterns and designs of each is impossible to distinguish form the next. There is a fireplace in the back left corner, and a round table in the center with two chairs at it. Over the table is a lantern, casting the brightest light in the room. Candles and incants are thick, but the smell doesn’t choke you. In fact, it’s almost like there is a breeze in the room, to keep it airy and comfortable to breathe.
At the round table, the center of which is occupied by a crystal ball which has collected dust for lack of use, is seated one person, always the same person. She is deceased. Why my subconscious has chosen her as my fortune-teller, I do not know. She cries a great deal. For the first few visits, I asked her why she cried. No matter what her facial expressions, tears always ran down her rosy, healthy cheeks, unfamiliar for in her life they had been stricken and threateningly slender. Every time I asked her what caused her grief she laughed, the tears still streaming down her face, and waved away my remarks as though they were a joke. So I stopped asking.
Sometimes, I cry with her. I had never seen her cry during the course of the three years I was acquainted with her. However, this great weakness I saw in her when she was a part of my – what can only be described as- lucid dreams shook my core and rattled my heart. I cried with her often, and sometimes, I ceased to ask the questions I so desperately wanted the answers to so that I may hold her and she hold me and we may cry with one another. I wake up from these dreams my bed sheets moist with genuine tears. Crying with her was the first time I had cried in my sleep. Oh how I felt relieved. I was grieving, my wounds still raw and fresh, and I was relived to see that I was not numb with the pain, that I still felt it. I suffered, and I knew it now when I had doubted it before. I breathed a sigh of relief; I was recovering.

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