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The silence of the settled morning yet on the verge of life captures the attention of my thoughts instead of the distant voices of people dreaming in their beds. From the desk in my room I stare outside a large window reflecting on the solitary world outside. I think softly---I stand in my house right now, sheltered from the world outside, what is the world that I see? Around me books by ancient authors that I want to sap eternal thoughts from flutter about. My eyes focus on the book I just digested, Ptolemy’s Almagest in its original Greek. Pure thoughts, purer language. My room appears a total mess, quite possibly a symbol of my disarranged mind.

Somehow I feel urged to walk towards the dawning morn outside as if my body was sleep walking. Inside, my eyes watched my body take control and walk on its own to the outside street. I was outside, just as I had been every morning, but this morning felt different. I always felt mornings were the serenest times, perfect for solitude, as if the morning symbolized the world at a thoughtful state. I had wanted to stay inside and avoid the tempting dawn, but my body seemed a magnet dragged by the morning’s infinite strength. Light had yet entered into the morning. A bluish tint covered birthing sky. Peppered evidence of stars that once shone bright all night placated the lighter purplish backdrop that was giving way to the almost arisen sun. I begin to wander, or what I have always perceived as more a saunter, around the natural morning that I was the only one to enjoy. I see a world that shines with clarity and seems agreeable to the advanced thinking mind. It becomes a secret world vast like a new-found westward expansion, special beatitudes created for me to enjoy. However the mood, as always, settles: the feelings incline towards nostalgia and melancholy. It is after joy that I realize how my days are limited. I calculate the possible 85 years I am assumed to live, with 365 days in each year, 24 hours in each day, and 1 morning that each day allows. I think of how these mornings, the short high points of my life, disperse into my fading memory, while a dirty reality eventually takes it place. I reminisce about boyhood mornings when I kept these same feelings towards the dawning of day. Inside, have I changed, will I ever? Although I treasure these mornings, are they but tempting desires for a better world that maybe does not exist?

I walk with solemn and contemplated stare along the sidewalk whose deep cracks show age of others who have passed. Staring intensely at the gravel I ponder on the nature of its creation and apologize with my mind to the Earth that has been covered. Focusing closer, I notice a message written into the cement, the phrase: “Long live Leonard”. A poor soul who deeply wanted not to be forgotten. Where has he gone? What has his life led him to know that I have not? Long will Leonard live in the universal sorrows of my mind.

To my surprise, I look up from the ground’s etchings to notice an elderly man sitting on the curb next to me with large deeply fixed eyes onto what I was doing. He was a gentle old man dressed in a past generation suit. I wondered why he was dressed so nicely for a morning walk. The goddess of dawn, Aurora, does not care what clothes one wears in a morning. I felt insulted that such a man should be seen in a morning that was my own. I receive a strange sense from this man, the intruder into my beautiful morning world that was meant only for me. As with the usual mornings I never saw another soul, in these thoughts I privately induced that maybe the old man, like me, carried a longing for the beautiful.

I assumed I must partake in poetic conversation with the man, maybe talk about Keats’ “Upon Reading Chapman’s Homer”? We men of the morning seem to enjoy those thoughts.

“Quite the pleasant morning, isn’t it?” I sigh, forcing a pleasant tone that I hoped created an amiable but false disposition.

He concentrated on me longer, not saying anything. His brows curved downwards resembling more of a scowl, like an owl. He broke from this judging stare and seemed to loosen his uptight body and softly chuckled as if he carried some private riddle.

“Look” he said. “Young man, don’t try to patronize with your big thoughts. I know your type, and I’ve seen them come by and by in the mornings. Leave this morning alone and sleep until the afternoon like all the fools of your age. And also leave what you see on the ground alone”

He was pointing to my friend Leonard’s etchings, the only lovely soul who knows what it’s like to feel the poetic pangs of loneliness. Clearly he too had been thinking about what he read.

“Bullshit, son!” He said allowed rather abruptly. I knew not why such an obscenity. “This man, Leonard, must have been a good man who needs not be disgraced by a young punk such as yourself!”

I was startled for a second, for it seemed this man had just read my thoughts. Did I just carry poetic lamentation aloud without myself knowing it? I couldn’t have said anything that profound, for once my thoughts move from my head to my lips they became degraded. I felt myself turning into the scowling red eyed owl on this elderly man who seemed to steal from my head.

“How dare you! To begin with, you don’t even have a clue with whom you’re talking to! Look, old man, I am quite different from any person you will meet my age. Those rejects you liken me to that sleep until the afternoon, they’re imbeciles that cannot appreciate the true beauties of life. I, on the other hand, wish to spend my waking moments reading poetry and enjoying the natural world. Also, how dare you intrude not only into my space, but intrude my thoughts, you cursed gypsy!”

I looked at his face and concentrated deeply. Like an uprising wind of hot air or a broken viola playing a distorted sound, his voice blabbered inside my head. They were his, but sounded more like a grumble.

(Poor Boy! Sees the world with so-called intellectual pursuit, trying to appease himself. Always molding it into his own thoughts. Selfish. I’ve experienced the world as it is. People know nothing. Never will know nothing. They only pretend to know something to take advantage of people and enslave others.)

I looked at the man and saw that his mouth was not moving. Just ignorant noise that I rightly assumed must have been the thoughts of his bitter mind.

(Oh yeah!) Thought I. (At least my youth gives me something to properly live for. You are the passing generation, I further the knowledge that you gained in this world and progress it for the better. I am just the next step of the mind’s closer pursuit to its own perfection.)

Was I arguing with him in actually within his mind or did I assume this to be what he said? It was not until I looked into his wide eyes that I fully realized that we were carrying a discussion within our minds. Our lips had not moved yet we were connecting to each other.

Baffled, I asked with my thoughts. (Wait, can you actually hear this?)

In silence he nodded like a scared, mute child. For a moment, our minds stood mute themselves. I was actually scared into not thinking a thought.

Suddenly, a gust of wind came upon us. A force beyond what I could comprehend came over the elderly man and I that seemed even more bizarre. A voice smoothed by with the wind ghostly saying, “Long live, my friends, long may we live.”

In ignorant fright both the elderly man and I escaped in opposite directions not waiting to find out what was going on. I ran into my house and locked all of the doors and shut the blinds. In my comfortable darkness I sat, the lifestyle that I was always used to. I was not scared of what had just happened because I could not see that as real. I never believed in superstitious mumbo jumbo nor did I want to start now. I did not hear another man’s thoughts nor did I experience a ghost’s voice. My head felt like a large pill colored blank. I cleared my thoughts and started over.

Maybe I can pull it off as a good story. I sat at my desk and turned on the lamp pulling out a sheet of paper. The lamp, the new star which I now orbited guided my pen to the paper which engraved “The long-living Leonard.”

Copyright 2007 Robledo Quindo
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