The Watcher

Thoughts of an Oddity

He kisses her, and she moans in pleasure, cheeks red, visibly flustered.
I watch the couple closely, uninterested yet unable to look away.
“He beats her… he hurts her,” they whisper.
That fact is obvious enough to me.

A gust of wind blows through the field and lifts her skirt; she shrieks and attempts to pull away, but he only holds her tighter-painfully so, and deepens the kiss. What once looked like a romantic scene quickly turns sour.
“He’s going to kill her… eventually,” I say to them.

Bored with the pathetic love story, I turn on my right side, watching the world play out before me. Weaving my hands through the grass beneath me, I rip them out of the ground and relish the light crunch it makes.
The sun shines down on the earth brightly, but the cool wind calms her temper. The birds throw themselves up from the nearby trees, screaming and singing as they paint the pale blue sky with their color. The smell of grass wafts through the air like fresh hot bread on a Sunday morning.

From where I lie, flush against the earth, the field seems to span on forever—an eternal stretch of green grass. The grass swooshes and crunches as you move over it, the grasshoppers flee interaction, the ants collaborate, and the butterflies flaunt themselves. The children run about, warbling and squabbling, and the adults?

They occupy, they pretend, and they wonder about life and living.
This day is what people would call a beautiful day.

As for me, I watch.

I dance the line between reality and illusion, life and death, walking the earth with a natural stealth, hearing what the blind man hears and seeing what the deaf woman sees. Thanks to my friends, the secrets of all are revealed to me. They travel the earth far and wide and bring back stories of all that breathe-tales that make my bones quake. My friends and I are one; they exist in me, but they do not exist for me. I have no names for them, for they are far too many and too volatile to be named.

People don’t see or hear my friends because they don’t listen, too distracted to see them slipping between shadows. I was born this way: seeing and hearing… watching. But the more I look, the more I listen each year, the more I become like them… fading into the shadows, watching as people pass me by, as my voice calls no attention.

I used to be a man; now I’m merely an essence, intoxicated by the simplicity of life and addicted to the complexity of man.

How terribly fascinating it is… the woman who thinks loving a man so stupidly is enough to make him love her just as much; the man who has it all but struggles to find a little thrill in life, kicking himself and nudging his nose to hide the glaring fact that he’s hardly ever not under the influence. The pastor cheating on his wife, the boy who was molested at school, the girl who hates her friends, the woman obsessed with the numbers on the scale, the businesswoman who lives to prove, the man who thinks he deserves, the girl and her needs, the boy and his desires, the cat that barks, the dog that struts.
I see the good as well every single day, light and airy, but the good is only so good when it’s not slipping through your fingers. The bad, however, is sticky; it has a preposterous sweetness to it. Knowledge is power, whether you use it or not.

Those who see me see me because they knew me, casting sideways glances, curious but disappointed.
“Such a promising young man,” they say, shaking their heads mournfully.
“Too bad he turned out this way… a madman.”

What does it mean to be mad? To be unusual? Unstable or perfectly stable?

Naturally in tandem with the balance of this world? Disturbed or completely at peace? To be insane or unusually sane?
I rise with yin and lay with yang. Push and pull… I feel everything, and the world keeps spinning.
Is the madman truly mad, or are your eyes closed?
Am I less than human because I’m aware I can be more?

These humans spend their lives aspiring to be seen, needing to be loved, slaving to build a life that fades, breathing and not living, only to die regardless. But I don’t.

One day, I will die, in a hole dug by my very hands, on a day as beautiful as this one. On that day, my friends will whisper still, and only the birds will sing for me. Yet I’ll die knowing I truly got to see the world and be alive in her, undistracted from her beauty.

It’s funny… hilarious even.
My father says I’m cursed. My mother says I’m gifted, positively different. Others say I’m odd- something to be avoided.
But me?

Untethered by the ambitions, thoughts, and instincts of normalcy… I say I’m free.