I live in a home in the middle of the countryside. My house is small and I don’t have many neighbors. The ones I do have live in large farms, so I don’t see them much. Please don’t ask me the name of where I live because I honestly don’t know. I don’t know the name of the country or even the land I live in. I live alone and off my farm, it’s smaller then the rest. Nothing really happens here and it isn’t really interesting, there is something of note though.
There’s a lake quite close to my house, not close enough to be associated with me but close, and every day at the end of the week a man comes to the lake without fail. He goes to the lake so frequently it’s predictable at this point. It’s so predictable if I wanted to I could use him as some sort of calendar. Every time he goes to the lake he does something quite different sometimes he cries quietly. Sometimes he weeps loudly. But rarely he sits in silence and stares blankly into the stars. The thing in common with all these actions and everything else he does is that he is always drowning in sorrow or fear. On each day I have never seen him display a remote sign of happiness or any other emotion.
I have watched him each day since the first time I saw him, I don’t think it would be wrong to even say it has become some kind of ritual. I never tried to ask him why he’s like this or even tried to speak to him in any way but I don’t know why, it’s probably because how captivating it is to watch him act out his dance of individual torment. There are no hints as to why he’s like this, when he weeps it’s mostly incoherent mumblings, and his external appearance gives no hints either. He is clean and the clothes he wears mimic that. They don’t look like they belong to a man of high standing but certainly not poor either. His car doesn’t give any hints either, it’s the same as him. The best way to describe him would be as just “bland”.
I’ve been watching this man for years and to this day we haven’t broken the cycle, we have both grown noticeably older and I still don’t know the answer. It’s driving me insane. So today I will ask him why he is stuck in this perpetual state of sorrow.
On this day he is crying loudly, I can hear his voice breaking due to his age and I yell out insanely to him while getting closer.
“What is wrong with you!? Why are you always drowning in your tears?! What horrible thing has broken you and brought you to this state!?”
He stops weeping and slowly turns around and I see him. His face is noticeably older and red from crying all these years and his eyes are so wet from his grieving I wouldn’t be surprised if he was practically blind at the moment.
He let out a smile, it was weak but it was the first time I’ve seen it in my lifetime. He lets out a slight laugh and says these simple words. “I don’t know either.”
You find another tome on the shelf.