A World Unready

The filtered ray seeped past the curtain and fell upon my crusted eyelids. I couldn’t open them fully. My chest constricted. Head throbbing, I groaned.

Had I been crying?

Spiked balls of luminescence doubled, bloomed and scattered slowly across the gray expanse within my shuttered lids, growing momentarily larger, yet fading as I drove the side of my index finger against my eye. I rubbed with a grimace, scrubbing, until only the red glow, shining and empty, remained. Echoing the raw swell of emotions flooding over me.

I cracked my lids and tested the view. I should not have expected anything different. I knew what was about to happen. I knew everything. I could predict every outcome of every eventuality. How this happened, I do not know. It came on as a delirium which soon gave way to a brightness within my mind. A cold, empty, clarity.

I was thrilled, at first. Toying with my guesswork, playing with the possibilities of wealth and acclaim. My mind mapped out the potential fame that this unexpected gift might bestow. But the delight of precise prognostication soon gave way to a deadening weight.

Truth, unmitigated and absolute truth, it turns out, comes with a piercing, frigid, knowledge. An understanding of all things, a disassociation from empathy, leaving only the dry expanse of hardened reality. And that is a terrible gift, indeed.

As I predicted, they came again, as they had through the night.

The faces.

I clamped a hand over my dry lips to stifle the moan rising out of me. My opposite covered my eyes. But it was too late. I had spied them and upon seeing, I had given notice of their existence.

Worse than the incessant words murmuring across the plane of my mind, all night long, piling and compressing, tessellating and rearranging into monstrously built, yet fragile, fortresses. Commanding attention, yet they tumbled if scrutinized too closely; crumbling, like decaying Legos.

I blinked rapidly, trying and failing to separate myself from the flock of images assaulting my imagination. The faces all -sorrowful, old, young, menacing, joyful, aching with yearning- were strangers. And yet. I knew them. Somehow, I knew them all. Their grievances and their questions. Those innumerable questions.

I owned the answers, just as I had miraculously gained knowledge of who they were; their names, residences, workplaces; their loved ones, friends, associates, and each and every limitless, trailing genealogical road which traveled back and further back in time.

Impossible. But true.

I held the answer to everything. This I was sure. How, I could not begin to suppose. I had the explanations, without exception, to everything ever wondered, and for everyone who yearned for closure of every shape, size and type.

I could help them.

But my stinging eyes welled again, my heart thrummed, and the pain in my skull spiked.

“It’s no use,” I spat to the faces, each turning away, blurring into shadow, back to the dark echoes in the far corners of my mind. Chasing them away with my refusal.

My heart clenched.

“There’s no point,” I explained to the whispering pleas of the answers longing to be known. I spoke aloud what my heart knew too well. 

The creeping cynicism which had taken root in my soul soon after the gift had been bestowed to me had grown strong, knotted vines throughout the night. Tendrils of bitterness crowded out the spaces where hope once resided within me.

“Christ. They would never be satisfied. There’s not enough knowledge in all the world to appease their hunger or their doubt.”

With a weak cry, I gripped the edge of my quilt, and turned with a rough motion to cast the blanket over my head, burrowing deep into the cocoon of my sweat-soaked bedding, blocking out the offending light; jabbing the pillow against my exposed ear, muffling as best I could the pleas.

Trying, and failing, to silence the need, the ache to share all the truth in the world with a world – I knew all too well - unready to receive it.