The Blind Man

The Blind Man

The baby was born into a world of wonder, a world sparkling and new, tantalizing all the senses with a myriad of delights. Every color was a miracle. Every sound a symphony. Every experience a revelation. He wanted more than just to touch the world he wanted to smell it, to taste it. The baby drank in the universe and knew, without words to express it, that he could never drink his fill.

A few years later, the boy, now almost a man, sat across the family table and ate the food of his parent’s labors while he dreamt rapturously of the future he would have. Beside him, his father droned on about his tedious day, his tired feet and his hopeless, monotonous job, but all the boy could hear was the sound of his future glories. Wealth, power, fame and sex. These technicolor triumphs were so real to him that he failed to taste the food his mother cooked or notice how his little sister had grown or look into the eyes of his father who would not be with him for very much longer.

The night was young and bright and full of possibilities as the young man sat at the crowded bar drinking with his friends. “It could happen tonight, “ he thought, although he did not take the time to wonder what exactly “it” was. Something would happen. That much he knew. Something. He was owed some bit of magic, some alchemy to transform his unexceptional life into the extraordinary existence which must be waiting for him.

And as he sat, his body, through a magical alchemy all its own, transformed the poisons he was drinking into simpler compounds he could use. Breath, released with his laughter, floated out into the world, to be changed by plants and inhaled again, a thousand times, a million, in a never ending cycle of transformation. With each breath, the young man touched every living thing on earth, but his mind was too clouded by drink and dreams to see. It was long past last call, the lights were coming on and as he settled the bar tab on a credit card, whose bill he could not pay, he knew that it would not be tonight. Tonight he was just another drunk at a bar.

It had been a hard day at work and the man came home to his empty apartment with no expectations greater than a cold beer and TV. He sat eating plastic food from a plastic container and watched a plastic person rattling off the news with a plastic smile. “This was his life”, he thought, with growing disbelief, as gray as his father’s and just as hopeless. He did not pause to wonder where his meal had come from. He did not taste the land where it was grown or the animals that had died so that he might eat. He did not even sense the human hand that had chosen the ingredients or designed its packaging. And although the man knew, deep down, that he hated his drab, lifeless apartment and the vapid, repetitive squawking of the TV, he did not turn it off and go outside into the clean, unpredictable night. This was where he lived after all. This was his life.

The old man lay in his bed and looked back at his life. Not the life he had, but the life he had missed. He saw every road not taken, every experience denied. He saw the loves he never found and the person he never really was. He looked up at the cracked ceiling and knew, with a certainty born of a long, lonely life, that he was nothing. That his life had meant nothing and his death, now far closer than he could face, would also mean... nothing. He did not marvel at the medicines that were keeping him alive and the minds that had created them. He didn’t even see the the nurse who worked tirelessly at his side or the other patients sharing their deaths. While inside the man, on every inch of skin, coursing through every vein and inhabiting every organ, billions of tiny life forms lived in harmony with his dying body. Without them, he would die in seconds. Without him, they could not exist. But the wonder of that, and the million other wonders, that filled every moment of his life were lost on the old man, whose eyes were only open to a past that never was, and a world rendered into a lifeless monotone by the palate of his perception.

“Ashes to Ashes. Dust to Dust.” The words of the priest fall into the empty air like autumn leaves in a lonely forest. The old man, whose body he was putting in the ground, had not been religious but the priest felt that something should be said before they cover the coffin with earth. He had not believed in God or heaven. Only hell was real to the old man because it was of his own creation. For the old man, death was an end, nothing more. But the miracle of life, that neither ends nor begins, does not require his belief or even his permission and as his body is lowered into the living, breathing earth, he returns to what he never truly left and joins that from which he was never truly separated. The wonder, the beauty, the mystery of his life goes on long past his ability to see it.