our revels are now ended; arc

I will bite the hand that feeds me if the only reason for my sustainment is to be indebted to the man of same stature in future times.

My life will not be pawned and traded like last month’s harvest or the family heirloom. No, my life is something shifting, unable to be fixated by a price or value. The thing about not only my life, but the life of any man who dares to call himself living, is that worth is not only subjective but variant. “To each his own” is a phrase I would like to be etched upon my tombstone if only to prevent those simple bystanders from making snide comments about what I did or did not manage to accomplish in the time I spent with beating heart and pondering mind.

I will not call myself alive now or at any time in the past, because as subjective as it may be, the way I have existed for the past eighteen years is no way for a man to live. I have spent day in and out shrouded by guilt that was not my own burden to bear. Being a boy of thick skin it became my duty to take my father’s wrongdoings, his missteps and wrong council and turn it into the gems that topped his scepter. In the beginning, he had promised that he would play king only for a day, but eighteen years in passing leads one to believe that maybe falsity now lied on the tip of his tongue. He would never admit to bringing misfortune to cross my path, but he never dared to deny it, either. When I would ask him if this was what he wanted, for one son to be broken bone by bone so that another would be allowed to be built he would never come into contact with a direct answer.

“But look at the man your brother is becoming.”

Look at the man I am now not.

Disdain began to accumulate like residue on the hollow spaces inside my bones left behind by every need that was not filled. I ate from leftover plates and scraped the scraps from their porcelain— my own reflection meeting my gaze became harder to label as my own as time slowly shifted and passed in a manner unnoticeable until it has almost completely managed to slip away.

If I lost myself in that reflection, I suppose that I would not mind very much.

I believe that this world can be stripped down until it is nothing more than a mirror of its own. Individually, each sees the world through a unique lens, one that cannot be replicated by even the greatest artisan. Genetics, morals, and circumstance simply three of the grains etched into its surface— I know that Abel and I see the world from quite a different perspective.

His world is crystal clear waters, open-ended thoughts, and speaking without restraint. He does not believe he leads a life of gluttony, but that is simply because he has not learned the true meaning of deprivation and its fundamental beliefs.

His world is color— I wonder what he would believe if he only saw the world in shades of grey.

My world is static— a blurry picture not meant to be deciphered accompanied by white noise unending. Silence is a sound of its own when it resonates in your ear so long you’ve forgotten what its true meaning has become.

I know an existence of bare necessity because I have come to accept it as routine. However, I would never wish for the life he leads. I do not wish to feast until my stomach suffocates itself at the thought of another bite. I do not wish to see so many shades of blue that I have to distinguish between depression and mourning the death of an addiction.

The fine details are always what fuck you over in the end— no man was ever deceived by a contract that laid a trap in the bold print.

If I was to characterize the ideal life, I would label it as one of generalizations. I would fill it with phrases like “somewhere in the vicinity of,” “probably,” and “something.”

It would drive my father mad.

Today, when he asks me to tend to his business down on the square, I shrug it off and tack on a “Probably,” for good measure, but he does not see this as an extension of my moral self.

“I was not making a request, boy. And take your brother along, teach him how to handle a man of lower intelligence and higher statute.”

The reason businessmen simply collaborate at arm’s length is that if they were to get any closer, their visions would blur.

And what blurry future of a world of color and that of grey could mix in any way other than chaotic?

I do not answer him when I turn on my heel and leave the room, headed down the hall to the second door on the left to shove myself through the doorway of Abel’s room. Comfort seeping from under the frame I do not knock as I enter— I will take away the luxury of privacy when the opportunity is so presented to me.

He is lax, half-asleep and discombobulated when I throw his coat at him from across the room as he watches me with wide-eye confusion. I have never been able to read my younger brother or decipher what he is thinking, but I suppose I have never truly wanted to. He sits in stupor, as if I mimic the ghost I think I’ve seen in these halls every night since the day he was born, “You’re supposed to come with me to the square to do business— come or not, you can’t say I did not make the attempt to get you to tag along.”

Forever the executor and receiver of punishment I was.