The Forest

Between Two

Between the two windows in his corner office, the sun set and rose in daydreams.  He sat looking out at views in both directions, straddled between the demise of a lifetime and the glory of its opposition.  They glittered in the sunrise and melted in the darkness.  Gifts that took from him more than they gave.  All alone at his desk, he held on tightly to one in his hand, scribbling down words with the frayed piece of vine once made worthless to him.  As his memories touched the paper, he gripped the stick even tighter between his fingers until it abruptly snapped in two under his strength.  Its splintered edges pierced his palm and he grabbed his wrist in pain, massaging it aggressively until he strangled away the grief of survival.  His memories now drawing him into a pale contrast of sabotage lying cold in the unfinished blank ending before him.

He stared down at the pencil broken in two parts with no recollection of what to do.

"You cannot scale a mountain holding on to two sticks. It is impossible."

Jack clutched his head between two palms that wouldn't work and stared down at unwritten words on white paper.  His arm, a weapon, and his thoughts, destroyed by indecisiveness.  The page flew across the desk in a flurry of anger under his rule, floating and wavering to the ground like a feather lost from its most precious source of life.  And then he leaned back in his chair and waited, clasping his hands at the base of his neck with a sense of accomplishment coming from a successful man that rewarded his own ignorance.

"And now you have two."

He agreed with himself.  

The elusive masterpiece of failure.

"But isn't anger your worst form of flattery?"

He fought with the very conscious that taunted him, allowing him to rust away in the dormancy of his weak mind.

"Are they both worthless to you now?"

His eyes closed, refusing to answer.  He searched deep inside for that voice on the mountain he heard all those years ago and found it stuck between two summits reigning down on a choice.  Splinters braised the nape of his neck in an uncomfortable rhythm of will as he peered out over the edge of the mountainside awaiting his return with two sticks holding on to the gift they protected between them. 

But behind the hail of ash at his back, stood another fury before him thick enough to stand still.  Its frost clothed the air in clouds determined to undermine his course.  They fell racing from the sky too fast to feel the bounty of its guise, tumbling through tunnels and hiding in corners neglect of thought.  And the mountain ahead of him, now steep in snow, still held no words.

"Is your silence a threat to them?"

They appeared as craggy, rock structures against him, standing one hundred times his height.  The summits, rising out from the wit of mockery left under his feet, were carved like gargoyles perched up on decrepit pedestals anchored in strangling vines.   

"You have disturbed our solitude with your presence," it let out a snarl. 

"By now, you must know you are not welcome here. You are no match for our army of power. So why have you come?"

A beastly laugh began raging a curse of ego deep within its exterior of stone, poisoning its own fate.   

"My wisdom wakes at dawn. And I thrive in your darkness. My tongue is lavish with eloquence and rich in thought. I alone designed the canvas under you that lead you here to admire my work. But even my masterpiece of failure grants the weak a morsel of success with which to feed."

They were determined to bury a last chance at success deep inside a mind struggling with regrets.

"Until a storm passes, its strength remains."

He swallowed down the words he never wrote and waited.  He waited until the storm settled its last snowflake to the ground.  And when the sky finally opened its roof to the glow of one that never fell, but shined in front of him like the tips of two sticks that made it, he planted them firmly beside him and wrote his story in the tracks he made behind him.