lucas kessler {d3/fin}

Schrodinger’s cat.

A glass not only half full, but half empty as well.

5,959 days of life, with the days of death numbered the same.

There’s balance in a disorderly word; an answer for every question.

And so I ask the same now, for if I have lived so long and only reached the half-way point, what is there that exists after those five thousand plus days of death have come to pass? Yesterday the number was decreased by two, yet I lived to breathe deranged air another day and so the number went up. Tomorrow it would increase again, and the same held true for the day after, and every day until my heart took its last breath that number would even out with the price I would pay in the grave for the pleasures I have had here.

5,959 of 11,918, with who knows how many more to go.

So if I did die today, if my heart beat its last in a moment or two or even now, and I did survive the pains and pay my debt, what came after that?

Was there a state of nonexistence that followed that 11,918th day?

But for now I would not know, so for the time being I would have to be content with counting half full glasses of crystal water and the waning moons that hung tenderly in the night sky.

I had plenty of purpose behind my reasoning, but my parents never felt the same. My father called it ludicrous, yet my mother could never bring herself to say the same. She’d run a hand through my disheveled hair and keep her eyes locked upon the floor, mumbling about how things were never trivial, and until this point I had thought her reasoning to be authentic, but on further thought it seemed to be that maybe she was justifying what she could not believe in by faith alone.

I do not believe in trivial matters for there is importance in every sense of the world, despite my mother’s gentle words and encouraging touch. And the more I thought for my own, away from the mind of my fact-driven father and my easily-swayed mother, the more I realized that there were few (or possibly none at all) similarities that I sported upon my own star-studded skin. I did share my mother’s fair hair and light eyes, the color which clouded at the dismal thoughts of doing wrong by way of another. I took after my father’s unnatural height, though one shoulder stooped just a tad lower than the other. Nothing of real note, but it set off a slight sense of discomfort when I found myself shifting my weight to the other side in hopes of evening things out.

See there was balance, even in the veins that coursed through my body.

And though I could find symmetry everywhere—in the sky and clouds and through panes of glass and computer chips, I could never quite find it in my soul. For the question still remained, what existed after that 11,918th day of death, and what would be waiting for me past it? The truth was that I would never know until I crossed that boundary, and each day lived and counted as a success would only draw out the epiphany that was sure to be at the end of that timeline.

For one day would truly be my last, and never more would I be tacking on trivial days to a timeline that begged for completion.

They say that only the good die young and I sure hope that’s true, for maybe then I’ll find out what’s necessary rather than telling tales to those who do not care to hear, for a child’s ears lack much of the reasoning needed to determine what lay at the end of an infinite road. They simply ran without direction, flicking from place to place as if it did not matter where they ended.

There was a difference here.

I knew my start, and I sure as hell knew my finish.

I suppose we’re supposed to fear what we do not know, but why is it not the other way around? We fear wars and disease and loss of love in the same way we fear the unknown, but these things are not equal and do not deserve to be held as so. For death and loss and heartbreak hold weight over a heart like a weight made of stone, collapsing upon any that stood in its unlucky path. But that which we are not made aware of, it does not sit upon our throats and cut off circulation, no, it sparks a flame, a drive towards an answer we’ll be lucky to find.

We all start with one question, and from there we grow, asking questions and answers that we may never come to closure with. And for a time it’s acceptable to ask questions as the only form of communication, and often we do without knowledge of it down the line.

(“What’s up there?”

“Why does the world spin round and round like that top”

“Why didn’t Landon come home?”)

And for a while the last question was the only one I asked, for I was never given an answer.

It was then that I took it upon myself to mark upon walls and books and wooden desks for each time I asked, for maybe if I asked just one more time, if I balanced it out with the number of days my brother had been gone I would finally receive an answer I was entitled to.

(“Where did Landon go?”

527. “He went away, Lucas.”

“I know, but where to?”

528. “To a place far away. A place where we will never see him again.”

“Why can’t we go there?”

529.

“Because we do not reach six feet under, my dear child.”)

I had lived 5,959 days, and I would have to stay dead for the same in order to balance out a world in which chaos seemed to rule, and if I could have my way, I’d stay dead for 11,918 more.

{o t h e r}

Lucas Kessler

Sixteen

District Three

oDair

1025