Man, Machine, Mortality

Walls of Words

He had a sickening feeling that while those around him grew and loved and fleshed out their lives, he would by alone; just a voice chasing trails of itself.  Harboring dreams but never letting them out of their gilded cages.  He felt lost.  Like his life was a joke, and he was a part of some sick reality he had never signed up for.  But then he remembered how to write.  So he wrote, and the days seemed to fall away.  The future he had seen before began to crumble around him.  When the walls fell he was left with nothing.  Nothing.  What he owned in the world, and what the world owed him.  So he sought to rebuild his house, but this time to construct it out of the cheapest substance known to man-- words.  All he could afford to give.  The world tried to diminish this valueless gift but he saw it for its true worth.  So his new walls were edified with walls and bricks of knowledge; the roof a layer of Poe, Dickinson the floorboards, and various African poets comprised the bedrooms.  They told him stories of their past present and future as he fell asleep.  Aesop himself was the boy's pillow.  For once, the boy was happy.  

When the house was complete, and the words hardened like the stones of the Gobi, the boy dreamed a new dream.  So he went about here and there, seldom going anywhere, and spread his words across the seas.  His words build homes, and his dreams inspired the sleeping masses.  They awoke and rose from the ruins they called home, and left their old homes in ruin.  Frost called them to build along the road less traveled and travel they did along the road.  They saw many sights and wonders so grand that the words they used to build could barely handle the weight.  But wait they did, as their constructors added more and more to the structures.  The boy now had a boy, and his boy,  a girl.  So they lived in the house of words, learning as often and as vigorously as the day the boy set out.