Black Catz

Chapter Six - "Re-Devined"

It has to be any minute now, that they role-up on us: The Government Party.

We just buried all of their in-house soldiers outback.

What part of the "common-law treaty" is this?

Thus, we don't wait for the Government to show-up. That's obvious. I'm guessing you had already guessed that by the way Oso moves around so much.

Once we were done, and once Oso made more phone calls—away from us, of course—we took back the blankets we had temporarily placed the dead soldiers in, and we headed back for Black Catz. I don't think any of us felt good on the drive back either.

This time, unlike the way to the burials, I took the car with Congo and Oso.

I had yet to meet the whole Black Catz crew, so I stuck with the ones I knew.

************

In school one time, long ago, I think when I was in sixth grade—before I came to this side of the Wall, obviously—one of my teachers once told the class that he knew the secret to life, and once we figured it out, we'd all be as calm as he was.

And 'till this day, I always wonder why he didn't just tell us the secret to life. Isn't that what being a teacher is all about after all: helping your students?

And since that day, I've tried figuring out what secret—or secrets—he was talking about. And sometimes, I think, I have found that secret. I thought, at least, that I had found it before I came here—to this side of the Wall.

I thought the secret was writing. I thought it was simply expressing your feelings—or learning to express them—that would lead to any chance of true happiness.

But now, being here, living what I have with these Black Catz, I don't know if I think writing is the true secret, or if any other idea I might have had would be remotely close to whatever that teacher was talking about.

And now, the more I think about it, the more I start to believe that that teacher, that day, never told us the "secret" to life because there is no secret to life; because life is simply this; it's simply that; because life is simply pointless, and nothing we do, no matter how much we try—like how the black Catz people try to do what is right and how the soldiers tried to do what they think is right for their government—matters, because we'd all eventually get our thoughts wrong and we'd simply end up back where we didn't want to end up in the first place; thus, nothing mattering at all.

So maybe, I think, that was why the teacher never told us at all. What we did not know could not hurt us, in his mind, which is perhaps true, because taking my time here, with the Black Catz, has deeply hurt me. Oh, what I would do to not have lived or learned any of this; but then again, I would have not known. So would have it been better?

I mean, what is better? Knowing? Or not knowing?

Does pain exist if you can't see it?

Does hurt, hurt if you can't feel it?

Would these Government soldiers have died if they would have never given a damn about the government? Probably not.

Or maybe what I learned was that there is no secret and the only secret is realizing that death is inevitable and embracing it is the closest thing to finding that secret, if there is a secret in life at all.

Or maybe everything, all these ideas and beliefs, are part of my own myopic self-obsessed pyramid? 

************************