The Clarity
He remembered the first time he found The Clarity. He couldn't have been more than 3 years
old and he was walking with his mother through a shopping mall, holding her
hand as he always did. Close by there
was another mother and her daughter by the fountain talking with each other. It was strange sounds at first, but then he
reached out to understand what they were saying, and then he knew. They were talking about the strange american
waffles they had just had for breakfast.
He asked his mother "What does 'american' mean?"
His mother looked down at him, followed his eyes to the
other mother and child, and she said comfortingly to him "They are
speaking French, which is why you don't understand them". And then he replied. "But they are talking about the strange
american waffles they had for breakfast".
This caused his mother to laugh, and rub his hair with her
hand.
Of course. He was only 3. She looked down at him smiling and said
"You sure do have an imagination, little man", then took his hand and
led him away. That is the last he saw
of the mother and daughter, though he looked ahead for them, and knew that they
would have a nice day together.
It was strange, that first moment of self-recognition, and
his mom acting that she might not have been able to understand the mother and
daughter like he could. Over the
following weeks, He would turn it over in his mind, and kept it there for
awhile, and would look at it every now and then, like the colored pebbles he
found in his back yard, and put in the shoebox under his bed.
Then, the next time it happened, he was sitting with his
father, and his father was reading him a bedtime story about space travel, and
about the many planets circling the sun. He was interested, so reached out , and found
that there was something larger out there circling the sun, way beyond the
planets. Something more terrifying, so
he asked his father "what is that
big thing out there, further out than
the planets, Dad?".
His father gave him a perplexed look, and then a warm smile, and tousled his
hair. Again, with the hair. Maybe that's what adults do. "Interesting idea, son. Maybe one day you can write a story about it." Then he knew his father didn't understand,
but he could not explain this to his father,
because it would require explaining how he knew, and he didn't have the
words for that. And without the words,
he was beginning to wonder if he could even understand it himself.
And then there were other things. He would pick up a rock, and reach out, and
then know what it was made of and where it was from. It was interesting that everything has a history
and a story. But his friends didn't
seem to know or care about that stuff.
Sometimes he would tell them a bit of the story, but then they would
laugh and move on. They were always in
a hurry together, for the next thing.
Rocks were just things you threw and then forgot about.
Or, sometimes he would walk by someone in a crowd, and if
they looked interesting enough, he would reach out, and then he would know who
they were, and their parents, and their parent's parents. He learned that he could go as far back or
forward as he wanted. It was all
there.
Everyone had a story as well,
just like the rocks. He got to Know
people that way.
He realized that he could Know things that other people
didn't. And it wasn't like he tried to
know those things. It was just that he
reached out and they were there.
Knowing something was like a river flowing around him. An invisible swirling mass. When
he wanted to Know something, he just reached out, and it was there waiting for
him.
He never told anybody
he could Know things, even his parents.
Whenever he got close, they always laugh, and maybe do the hair thing. He sure could tell stories, and he just had a
wild imagination. He was young, after
all, and no one ever took his stories seriously anyway. After awhile, he just didn't share anything so
much about what he knew, but could not explain. It stopped people from shaking their heads
at him.
When he was ten, he decided to stop trying to Know people
also. He would meet someone and like
them, but when he would reach out he would then know that their children would
one day die in a car accident, or that maybe a person he reached out about he
would learn secretly liked to kill small animals. Things like that. You know things like that, and you can't
look in their eyes, anymore. It wasn't
good, so he just decided one day to stay away from reaching out about most
people.
Sometimes It was better to just
not to know.
It never did him lot of good to reach out to things in
school, either. They would be studying
something like biology, and he would start to reach out and begin to look at
the evolutionary history of a particular species and he would get lost in that, and
then not be able to give the more simple answer that the teacher was looking
for out of the textbook. The main
problem was that the textbooks didn't tell him anything interesting. They were just words that pointed to things. The other problem was that, When he Reached
Out, He didn't have the words to explain the things he found. So in
the end, he just tried to read the
textbook like all the other kids, and he only did ok on his tests. Not great, but ok.
He knew that he was Different. He was a lonely island of awareness, with everyone
else just unconsciously going about their lives around him, and him with his Knowing
Things, or even sometimes intentionally not knowing what he knew. He sometimes hated what he knew.
But even with all that, he realized that he couldn't stop
what was inside of him. The only time he
allowed himself to reach out was at night when he was alone with the freedom of
his thoughts and his curiosity. Many
things interested him. Animals and
Trees, Clocks and Weather Systems. The
forging of planets and continents. History. The Endless Stars, and the cycles that lay
beyond the edges of the universe. At
night, in the darkness of his room, he would let his mind wander through The
Clarity, and drift in that river of knowledge, like floating on his back on a
moonless summer night, gazing up at the stars. It went forever.
It was utterly amazing.
All those things without words, so he that he had to put his own words
to them to begin to understand them.
The Swirling. The Pulsation. The
Burst. The Cycles.
The Swirling Ecosystems.
The movement of stars against the walls of Darkness and Silence, and the
Cycles beyond. The Thread of Time, frayed
as it was on each end, and The Flashing holding those frayed ends in place.
He could know all these things, but could never explain
them.
As he got older, he began to read scientific research papers
online, and every once in awhile, he would send out a few anonymous thoughts to
the author of a paper, sort of pointing them in the right direction. Sometimes he could tell that they understood
something that he tried to explain, and it made him feel good that he could
help, when he saw in their later papers that they took his advice.
Then one day, when he was 17 years old, he was walking down
the street, and a pretty girl he didn't know smiled at him. Him, of all people. Dorky Him.
His heart raced. There became a
loud ringing in both of his ears. He
couldn't help it. He reached out and
knew that for her it was only a momentary smile, one quickly given, and then
just as quickly forgotten, but it was not that way for him. He
walked for awhile, absorbed in the thought of her. Then he stepped out onto the street, and it
was then that a delivery truck ran him over.
Killed him right then and there.
And then he was in the river again.
Of course his parents grieved for him at his funeral, but it
was not like he was in any kind of place to tell them that it was ok. Then the river pulled him away from all
that. His parents, the girl, and who he
was.
It was funny. What
it was.
That. Whatever it was.
Whatever. What?
He drifted beyond the Cycles. Beyond the Frayed Ends.
Then, after awhile.
Oh look.
Light.
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