Size of a Shoulder

A young man walks for miles through wind and sand.

He climbs.

Four thousand footsteps. His sandals decay.

Don't.

Think about it. He climbs.

His parched body reaches the top of the mountain, the monastery. His parched neck hydrates. The wise old man who sits on the top of this mountain is not here, for trouble exists elsewhere and he is a very wise man, the young man's parched throat is told.

His lips crinkle.

That lemony shiver that sometimes rides up the middle of your back all the way to the base of the spot where your skull rests on your neck, (interestingly, a perplexing human development occurs at this point, as people always mentally imagine it about two inches too low) shivers behind the middle of his back all the way up to the true base of the spot where his skull rests.

There is a seat of power, he discovers, at the highest point in the highest tower in this monastery on top of a very high peak in the Hajjouin Range outside Damascus. It is vacant.

The young man climbs stairs. His hand presses against the carved red stone, dragging slightly behind the anticipation of reaching the top, which at the time had a three step lead, in just such a fashion as to delude an already foolish child's impression of a world's characterization as still heavier than it ought.

Sky.

His innocent dendrites fire madly parallel processing lightning synapses in a knowingly impossible frant to understand a landscape intoxicatingly beyond comprehension. There is a range in these particular mountains where one experiences a perfect irony over the course of only one minute: sunlight burdening a climbing man with the exact weight of a summiting man burdening in revenge.

And this young man was weighed upon heavily.

He sits on a seat overlooking the world and nimble thought solidifies into reality with great mass under horrible weight. He sings and entire cities celebrate.

He smiles and respectable senators break into laughter; he cries and little children die in the street.

Listen.

Believing this could remain with him, he walks. Down stairs. Through the gates of the mighty monastery with a peak from where all who summited had left.

Down paths of sand and wind he falls. The sun again becomes heavy over the shoulders of the man.

At the bottom of the very high mountain sits an old man quietly being sunburned. Perplexing. The young man asks.

Are you the wise old man who lives on top of the monastery on top of the mountain on top of the world?

Silence.

This is an odd email to get in your inbox on Monday morning, I know. But you know it is well agreed that some tales deepen a soul's understanding of its surroundings. The meaning of these next words must therefore be taken to be greater than they are, for this email is not one of them.

Gravity, the old man says. I can't help but keep a good body down.

And for only one second there is a child who stares straight into the heart of a frightening mass of an entire the world, straight into the heaviest mass of his mind and the naked gruesomeness of a small portion of humanity in torture chambers and riots across a massive globe whose weight is only now fully understood, and, if only in his head, if only for his own good, if only for one second, grows broader shoulders.

Six billion and six hundred million people survived last week. I'm glad you did too.