ashes

Ashes

“Come on! This is the time! Now! When, if not now? This is what you asked for, this is what you got and now you sit here and complain about how things are, wondering about what to do, and doubting everything there is, including yourselves and your lives! These are your lives and the decisions are up to you!”
He was frustrated, of course, as he watched them there, in front of him, bodies shriveled, like shrimps, in chairs, their gazes directed to the floor, arms crossed, heartbeats barely existent, thoughts running in weak, out of focus circles the color of fog.
“I need a volunteer!”
Nothing.
“OK. Then I am choosing one. A volunteer. What’s your name?”
A blurred gaze didn’t move away from the floor and the answer revealed complete unawareness of completely everything.
“What?”
“What is your name?”
“Who?”
“You! I’m talking to you. You are the volunteer. What is your name?”
“Name?”
“Yes, name, what are you, an idiot? You don’t know your own name? What is your name?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you want from me...”
The mind, lost in fog, was spinning around itself and the heart, slowed down by the weight of nothing that existed everywhere in that mind and in the body, started slowing down even more.
“I volunteer you! Get up, introduce yourself, then tell us what it is you will make of yourself, then get the hell out and do it. Now!”
Something wasn’t right in the vacuum of the damp existence. A step in the unresponsive logic was missing and the mind got lost on the way to nowhere, on the way to being lost. The missing step tripped over itself, there was a tiny spark, like a thought that wanted to give birth to itself, a spark trying to grow into a beginning of a fire, but it found itself under an ocean, with nothing dry in sight and no light to see anything, and it died an overwhelming, complete death, before it even existed.
The person just collapsed to the floor, fell down from the chair, stopped breathing and turned to ashes.
The wind blew in through the window, there was a draft and the ashes flew out of the door, leaving nothing behind, except a face, frozen in amazement.
“Did I just cause this by volunteering him? Did he just disintegrate in front of me, or was that a choice? Did he turn into ashes on purpose, because that’s what he wanted to be and that’s what he wanted to make of himself, then went out like that to be that?”
No answer. Just more shriveled bodies, slumped in chairs, defeated.
“Look at me!”
Nothing!
All gazes still on the floor.
“I will volunteer every single one of you and send you out there!”
And that’s when it started happening. Heartbeats stopping, gazes extinguishing, thoughts melting into dry sand, bodies breaking and collapsing, falling down on the floor, no movement, just disintegration, disappearance, destruction and then just piles of ashes in front of every chair in front of him.
The wind started blowing again and the ashes started mixing with other ashes, everything floating around the room in a whirlwind of ashen confusion around him, who was left standing there in utter amazement.
“What is happening?”
And the moment he uttered these words his body fell apart into the particles it was made from and he, as well, turned to ash, and joined the dancing grayness bouncing around the room. It was a big cloud, filling the whole space, particles bouncing off one another, until, after some moments, the wind subsided, the air calmed down, and all the ashes fell to the floor, ending in a big, dry, gray pile in the middle of the room.
A pile of ashes.
It stood there, dead, unmoving, lost...
Silence.
The the wind blew again and took the whole pile out, through the door, sent it out into the world in a cloud that started spreading into a thinner cloud, but a bigger one, a traveling fog, thinning and thinning and spreading out, particles moving away from one another, until there was no connection anymore, and the ashes were lost, broken apart, joined the atmosphere and the world to be a part of what they were never part of, to start existing, out there, in a way that signified no existence, at all.
Nothing.
The world.