One Hundred Years of Solitude(A hundred-and-forever, actually))

I wonder if I got through to her. The air had been clogged. It was starting to seem as if someone had poured a layer of oil over everything and all movement had become sluggish.
There. That's where words came in. They stayed away in a corner first, running here and hiding there, cowering in a corner, avoiding. They didn't want to come out. The air was thick.
Silence is like a disease. It breathes and bubbles below the surface, swelling softly into a pale pink fungus, threading thin lace coverlets over chairs and tables and lamps and rugs and books and the dog. Thin, but deceptively sly. It hides. And grows.


Suddenely though, the rock had had enough. It was sick of the starry white heat that floated in snaky folds in its stomach. It wanted out. The thick, red, creamy, blistering magma that burned below the surface had to come out. It clenched its eyes and squeezed hard. It squeezed all day. Started as feathery shafts of pale morning light clinked her morning glass of juice and kept squeezing until night had come. Night came. With stars in her backpack. And the moon on a walking stick. The stone squeezed.


A man comes.
His dark brown robe is faded. Patches of rough, fibrous earth cling to his sandals. Dust in his hair. Dry erosion on his lips. Everything on him is finely dusted with a barely-visible layer of indifferent, familiar exhaustion.
Only his eyes are bright. Gold flecks in light brown circles. Pieces of gold in soft soil. Fire and Earth.
"They" say eyes are windows to the soul. If "they" are right, then his soul is free. Like fire. Like the wind. Because his eyes are free.
He looks at the stone and wonders. He bends down to pick it up and holds it up in the light. (The stone, ofcourse, is still squeezing itself). The sun is being tyrannical today, he thinks. Thin watery veins of sweat slink down his forehead. A man and a stone(squeezing itself) in the heart of a desert. Gold and the earth. Hot stone and simmering magma. History is on the move.
"Time", who was sitting atop the wind as it flew from white ice to white heat, pulls at the reins of its ride, and pauses to look at the man and the stone. It sees the coming of age of two elements through each other. A stone who begins to squeeze. A traveller who begins to think. It smiles to himself. Time, that is. A faint strip of a smile that stands at the edge of a melancholic memory. It remebers Adam and the apple. It remembers adolescent water droplets and the evaporating light. It remembers rocks and the wheel. It remebers stone and the fire. Element to element. It smiles and gazes fondly at the stone and the traveller. It wonders which direction history will take this time.


The stone has almost reached a climax. It writhes in an orgiastic frenzy as the deep white heat inside its stomach scatters and recollects. Showers of white sparks and then the rich heat of a fused red. In one last final moment, of sheer will, the stone tastes life. Elements unite. Its sweat is the sweat of the man who holds it. It squeezes, the wind dances, time watches, stars hop onto each other in the traveller's backpack, the moon cranes its neck on his walking stick, the universe shifts and the stone rips itself right through the middle. And a hot, red river stretches itself, as it rises from the depths of what it breaks as it comes out.


The traveller screams as the heat makes contact with his fingers. With his dust. He lets go. In one moment of light, of shock, of heat, he lets go. He finally lets go. He lets his backpack fall. The stars that he had been carrying for his own sliver of eternity. The stars that had fallen from the sky where he had danced with them. His insight comes. And he lets go.He finally lets go. The stone hits the desert. Heat and achievment. Death and Life. A dance of elements. Coexistance. And each one of them, dances to the same music. And each one of them, leaves. In the end, there is solitude. It prevails.He understands now. Change is a constant that is built on another constant. Solitude.


One Hundred Years Later:
Time comes back. As it does, always. It sees two pieces of soft stone on a hazy desert bed. The sun shows no mercy. And the heat creates chimeras in the desert. But truth lies in those chimeras. Both the stone and the traveller saw where these chimeras come from that one day in the desert. Not from the sun or the heat. But from them. And they saw the sliver of truth that hides itself under layers of chimeras in the desert like words under thin, lacy coverlets of silence. And they both left pieces of themselves in the desert that day. To celebrate this discovery of truth. The truth that came to them in their togetherness. They moved on and left something behind. When the pendulum of history brings them back here, independant of each other, and moving in new directions, they will look at that one moment in the desert and smile.The stars and the stone will be gone then. But Time had stopped for them.So now, they own a piece of eternity. Of "forever" as "they" say. Because change is built on solitude. And there is no running away from that.