Song: This One's for the Girls--Martina MicBride
Word: Agora
...
Thirty
He’d been a man, a young but mature man. The dazzle of Septa paled into actuality and a routine life. He went to bed with the fishermen in their wooden lodgings, where a stale gut wrenching smell become his world. He sailed out to sea daily at the break of dawn, marooned in his chipped boat on the mass of the ocean, rocking along with the waves, the air painstakingly quiet. By late after noon he heaved up a full net of thrashing fish as they trembled to their death, their wide eyes gaping as life surrendered to the hands of men. The salty smell of the sea lay forever on the back of his tongue, bitter and painfully real.
The fishermen were his only companions, grubby tanned faces, rough smiles and casual shoulders. Their words harsh and careless were what he’d grown used to. Bouts of loud laughter and a rough thrust of their shoulder against his was their form of greeting. He was the quiet one, the queer one.
It was at thirty when he sat by the docks, his trousers rolled up, his legs submerged in the water. He took to gazing at the towering mountains so much closer to him now. His mind wandered off to what lay beyond them, the life he had given up, run away from, surrendered.
He wondered, smirking to himself, if he was greatening the heights of men by throwing in his fish nets, the way he desired to most his boyhood.
He lay at night, the silence around him hostile and overbearing. The air stuffy in the lodge, but he usually didn’t have the heart to gasp for fresh air. He laid silently, eyes wide open, gaping at the life he was leading. So meaningless. It had come down to this. He was better off in his village milking cows, he could at least look at the sky and feel that he mattered, that his absence had the ability to upset people. He was nothing here. No importance to anyone. If he had come or hadn’t, it would have made any difference. The fishermen would go on guffawing and drinking, the fish would continue being caught, and the market place would continue being lined up with stalls of sea smelling creatures.
With each breath he took those days, he hated himself. He hated the soiled hands that heaved the nets into the small boat, he hated the feet that walked each day to the market, barrels of fish in tow. He despised the mouth that called out to women and men alike to buy his fish; he hated the fact that he only lived to feed his stomach now, only to continue breathing, to continue detesting himself.
Sopta was indeed a bustling city, full of confusion, mischief and snares for a simple farm boy like him. Sopta was the centre of the world, but he was not in the centre of it. People like him were cast off, thrown to the side, too meager to do any greatness. Sopta did not need him, did not want him. To be part of Sopta he’d have to better his reading and writing, and learn to throw his shoulders back when he talked. He’d have to loose the smell of fish that clung to him day and night. He’d have to afford a carriage.
It was another hot stifling night, the sea quiet; he could hear the fishermen snoring. He tossed and turned all night, but sleep would not come. The darkness loomed over him, hauntingly silent, prodding him for answers he did not know. The air was hot and stifling, he could not breathe, and his mind felt muted, incoherent thoughts buzzing around his head like a swarm of mosquitoes. Every time something began to make sense, a clear thought as he tried to grasp it, it simply slipped away. He closed his eyes, dizzy.
It was then that a strange queasiness crept up his stomach, tugging at his abdomen, overpowering him. He sprinted out of the room, into the breezy night and vomited against the rocks. And out came with it a wave of overwhelming emotions. He sat there, crying, lonely, homesick, confused, and feeling like a boy again, lost in the world. He made soft gasping sounds, trying to control himself, but he was bitter, heart broken. The world was bitter. He wanted to go home. He wanted his mother’s warm embrace, a hot bowl of soup and the evening stars smiling at him. But, the world was cold.
He lay down on the sand right near the waves that night, staring at the night sky, the vast deep mysterious sky open and looming ahead, unsupported by anything. His tears slipped out as he whispered softly, “Help me. I want to live.”
His heart raced just looking at the sky, overwhelmed by the tremendous expanse of stars just merely existing before his eyes.
And he slept, warmth embracing him, kissing him.
It was when he was thirty that with boyish spirit it dawned on him in a refreshed manner that he was created for better things. In the days to follow he began to carve anew the puzzle piece he’d become. He need not fit any longer.
He took to stealing away in his corner when the fishermen went to the pub. He’d open his grammar book and begin jotting away in it with a fresh spirit each day. It was his grammar writing book that turned over in his mind when he sat in his small boat rolling along with the waves. He eventually started bringing away his book on his boat, and he’d do two pages every day, no longer anticipating a full bellied net as the glory of his day.
The fishermen eventually found him out, and he was introduced to a new ordeal. The difficulty men can create for each other. He’d blush as they teased; embarrassed that he was trying to educate himself, embarrassed that he desired a meaningful life. But maybe it was what they desired most too, just didn’t have the boyish strength he had to fulfil their desires. Their will had rotted away with their clothes, tattered and insufficient to make something of them.
They despised him, their jealousy forcing them to make his life torturous. They’d tangle his fishing net, and he spent the afternoon untangling, in turn not catching much fish, only to go to market with less fish, and a lighter weight in his pocket upon his return.
The pushed him and bullied him at the slightest thing. He wasn’t a coward, just cool headed when he’d bow his head, clutching his notebook against his chest, colour rising in his face, as the fishermen jeered and jabbed his chest. He never said anything. What good would it do? He didn’t trust them anymore, and kept his book under his pillow.
He puzzled at man’s reason. Why did they not encourage, or support him with good cheer as he pushed to makes his dreams come real. Why must they ram him down, burden him, dampen his sprits just because a noble idea had come into his head?
He wanted to become a scholar. They were trying to teach him that fishermen did not become scholars. It was as if they did not want to acknowledge the possibility that they too were wasting away their lives. But then of course, someone must fish, someone must support the economy of Sopta through the fishing and show up at the market place. They were indeed living bigger lives than they acknowledged. But fishing just wasn’t his personal greatness.
On his way to the marketplace, he’d stare through the windows of the great brick building that he heard people call the library. In it sat men, their heads bowed in books, drinking in all that delicious knowledge they held, and again his heart desired to be on the other side of the wall.
It seemed all his life, he longed to be on the other side of a barrier.
Thirty two
He’d bought a scented soap for the first time in his life. He never felt so clean and fresh. He trimmed his beard till it was short and neat, tamed his hair and dressed clean in the second hand clothes he’d bought. If it weren’t for the gnawing hunger in his stomach and the fact that he’d spent his month’s income distressing him, he thought he looked very much like the sophisticated scholars he saw busy in the libraries and mentioned in the newspapers.
He read newspapers now, and composed his own opinions. He knew there were people who like him, wondered about the stars, the significance Sopta held in the world, the significance mankind held in this world. He knew scholars did not find musing at the starry night sky a waste of time, but called it intellectual. Intellectual. He rolled the word on his tongue often. It stirred something in him, like a fluttering optimism that made his heart sigh and smile.
He ached to talk to them, to tell him what he thought. To present to them the possibility that the world was round, not flat. He thought so after seeing the soft roundness of the ocean he spent his days speculating for the last couple of years. The ocean was never absent of its roundness, the sailors had told him so. Did that not mean this world was round? His idea was a like a caged animal, hungry to be let out. He knew the scholars would not burst out into wild laughter when he presented his theory, like the fishermen had. Yes, they called it a theory. He had his own theory; it was like a delicious warm idea that he kept inside his head, a secret he knew that no one else knew. He mulled over it day and night, just the wonderful possibility that he was right excited him. He would be the first.
It was at thirty two he walked inside the library for the first time, his hand smelling of clean soap as he pulled open the heavy oak doors and stepped inside. It was uplifting, and he sighed and smiled all at once, pleasant shivers going up from his spine to the nape of his neck. Maybe he had expected them all to stand up and greet him warmly, but no one looked his way. They sat scribbling away in their notebooks, or flipping pages nonchalantly.
His heart beat fast, loudly pounding in his ears; he could feel the blood rush to his face as he made his way to the front desk. This was it, the moment, the climax.
The girl had looked at him suspiciously as he asked if he could have a library document. She asked if he belonged to any guarantor. Confused, he shook his head. She nodded automatically, answering that he was getting a limited library document. The philosophy, science and mathematics section were off limits. He could not take the books out of the library either. She said it mechanically, not all interested in him, pointing out the four bookshelves along the back of the room, a thin chain travelling their length with a neat plaque hanging from the chain. “Special Privileges Required.” That sign made him feel small, insignificant, and pitiful. It seemed to be taunting him. Sopta was truly playing out the constitution he’d longed to see, he thought bitterly. Had he really thought it was all so easy?
He got a library document. He signed his name on it himself, always taking the time to relish his sloping signature on the bottom of the thin paper. He read a small leather-bound book, sitting on the right side of the glass window, right inside the library, where the sunlight came in honey coloured, golden and divine, playing on the pages he carefully flipped. His heart sighed happily. It was his first time.
