Piqpagi

~Reflections~

The food Nanuq had filled my cupboards with was enough to keep me fed like a king for the whole week and I most certainly was not complaining but part of me felt a little guilty and confused for using his kindness especially as I thought more about him and about the bruises all over his face while I looked at the picture I had taken of him in the summertime.

I have to admit that he fascinated me from the beginning but I'm not entirely sure as to why?

He was something I had never seen before so perhaps that's all there was to it?...perhaps at first since when I looked into his eyes that night I felt more than just the curiosity that I had felt as a boy looking at drawings of other aboriginals in my father's safari books or as my father called them "mud-people" instead I saw something so beautiful and yet so sad.

A great painter I knew once told me that the reason why so many of the classic paintings that were considered beautiful we're sad is that sadness is the most beautiful human emotion, I didn't believe him at the time but now those words rang in my head like the church bells outside.

I found myself wondering for his well being as well as if he was really in prison and if so what for?

Prison infighting would explain the bruises to his face but thinking about it now I just couldn't bring myself to visualize the same man who took care of me and my home so graciously and was described as a good man by a fellow whom I trusted being involved in such a thing.

Logically I'm certain it's feasible and I suppose that even felons possess a conscience and an intention of repentance yet there still lingers the image of a rough lawless rogue with nothing but contempt for the laws of the public smiling with a wicked grin flashing nasty teeth and a jagged scar across his face or something like that.

Something like the criminals I remembered seeing in cartoons as a child, villains who were conscious of the fact that they were doing evil and proud of that validity and as much as I logically knew these images to be highly erroneous of how reality truly subsisted they still remained part of me and when I remembered of the eyes of the man I saw that night I could not envision him in that sort of way.

It didn't seem to make any rational sense somehow yet unless he was not being truthful about his circumstances for whatever purpose, it would prove to be the truth, wouldn't it?

I definitely suppose that I could have asked him that night but I didn't, in fact, I hardly spoke to him at all and now that I think of it I've never really spoken to the man, said a few casual things perhaps but never had a conversation especially not one that could be considered at all view-changing but still, here I was lying on my bed gazing at the photograph I had taken nearly a year ago like some sort of demented pervert.

Then I sat there in thought as I contemplated the last word of my inner monologue still staring and still allured until I felt a chill up my spine.

The fire in my woodstove had gone out and the firewood that was gifted to me was finally all gone and I could already see the frost glazing over the inside of the window frames.

It wasn't possible for me to purchase any firewood which meant that I would have to go outside to cut my own timber which I had been avoiding for quite some time since I had never even held an ax and had no idea how to wield such a terrifying and primitive tool but I have to start someplace.

I reluctantly got up and put on the fluffy boots gifted to me by Nanuq for the first time since my old leather boots were rotted and smelled like piss and mold, at first I struggled about how to properly put them on and secure them but once I had tied them I think I fell in love with the warm fluffy things.