Hello, Writers and Dear Readers.

On the channel today, we feature a tie for first in last week's challenge, and announce Challenge of the Week CCXXIX, which is linked just below this small paragraph, which will technically consist of four lines, because four lines just adds up on this hot and bright summer Thursday. Hope you sexy-minded beasts are keeping cool.

Number 229: https://theprose.com/challenge/14099

Channel link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6baahLzdXPY

And.

As always.

-Thank you for being here.

The Prose. team

There's an end to go with

Every beginning.

And despair that shows in

All our hope.

There's a weed that grows

For every flower.

And a drop to follow

Every rise.

A sheer cliff when

You least expect it.

And some that stand

Safe on the top.

Then there's those

Who

let

themselves

fall

To find the treasure

At the bottom.

And the treasure

is

the pain.

Heart pounding,

mind reeling.

I'm feeling the cycle start to repeat,

the sinking feeling of my head sounding off the alarms.

Like I'm losing my fucking mind.

There's something in the details,

something that keeps holding me back.

I know I meant a lot more to the rest,

the feelings I feel aren't the best.

Like a guilt that won't lay itself to rest.

Awful feelings, churning paralyzing waves through my body.

Taking out my waking moments as a corpse on stilts.

"Look at her walk, the marionette teetering at crumbs."

I watch her dance, watch me dance, like a puppet being led around aimlessly.

Fucking crippling when I feel this way, so hurt but so used to staying away.

Nothing more than a cripple,

cripple on strings, stilts, something—

Something propping me up, making me stop.

Making me run.

Making me sink into the black, fruitless as it is.

Walk. Walk little puppet. Don't run.

There's nowhere in the black different than where you have begun.

Imagine how powerful i’d be

If I didn’t need people to love me

If I didn’t have to dissect myself

Pick apart my pieces like everyone else

Then I could look in the mirror

Not always afraid of seeing error

Truly a tale of extremes, my friend. It breaks my heart to be reminded of that self-afflicted torment. Allow me to suggest an alternative: Momus, not Prometheus, is probably a more likely fit. For the mistake of finding Aphrodite the only one worthy and capable, thus deserving, of his (or anyone's) admiration, he torments himself and any around him for their falling short of acceptability. Love, in life, can seem a lottery of hearts, and we hear tales of those who profess to have won. They present themselves to mock our loneliness. Just remember that lottery winners pay heavy taxes--it's not as it appears on the surface. The tales of pure love are often tall, and just as children dream of astronauts and princesses, our mature dreams of passion and love can make our goal of a kindred spirit unrealistically lofty as well.

When we were young, our fathers put pressure on us to be our best, and the more intense the pressure, and the higher the expectations, the more likely we were to fall short. Why should a lover's engagement be any different? We are all but humans, not gods. To expect a commitment, especially to one who loves so deeply as you, to knowing every thread of your soul, to not only bringing forth her own very best, but to inspiring and motivating your very best as well--that's an expectation to rival our fathers' proudest dreams--as if we could ever achieve them.

And streets are lined with tents and sleeping bags--littered with the punished souls who were not granted their winning lottery tickets. I wonder if they look at people passing by--struggling day-to-day, working tirelessly, doing whatever it takes to feed their children, pay their mortgages, and stretch with all their might to reach just one more rung--and think, "Those lucky bastards!" And all the people passing by could pick out this soul or that, give them their days and their nights and their worries; but in reality, they will more likely pick out any one of those souls, and though they may search desperately for some speck of hope, end up thinking, "Why would I give a man such as this anything more than a few bucks for lunch?"

Those who wander the alleys and defecate in the streets so often ramble to themselves, flailing their arms and cursing every last thing, including the wind, are really quite similar to the politicians and lawyers with their arguments and speeches... "Listen, all who are near! Hear me and know this! For anything short of total agreement with all I say or believe, is..." what did you call it? "Mouths full of platitudes, meaningless blabbering with no basis in reality." To be perfectly honest, that was my favorite part--I've always had a soft spot for fatalism.

In truth, I was once you. I think a lot of people have been (if I may risk using myself as the norm). I'd wished for too long to believe that wishes come true. I considered for hours what I, too, called fate. And I threw it all on the winds and accepted it as my own. Then the very next day, The Boss came into my life, on what seemed like chance. It wasn't perfect or easy or completing or any other extremes but one-- it was hard work-- not hard in that I had to complete grandiose tasks or make life-changing sacrifices; it was hard in that I had to tell myself "yes" when so many times I thought "no." I convinced myself "stay" when my pride told me "go." I realized that this woman was not going to magically bring out my best, but that her love was going to require it--it was my choice, and my responsibility, to bring my best out of myself.

You see, my friend, it wasn't fate or karma which stood in my way--it was my own image of a love I didn't realize I had to earn to achieve--my unearned Aphrodite. In fact, truly, looking back, I've never met a man, woman, or child who I could not love--I only failed to allow it. I expected perfection and weighed each lover on that scale--not that they never had a chance--I just never gave them one. Those who win lotteries so often end up broke again, because their investment was only a dollar or two; but those who invest every ounce of their being into building a fortune others yearn to possess--a treasure they know through and through, which required their best and provided a fortune in return--they are the ones who will never, ever curse the wind.

shes sighs at the table and signs the paper

she hugs me

and tells me it's going to be okay

"5 minutes" the lady in the suit says

tells me she loves me

and that she didnt mean it

straightens my clothing

"it'll just be a weekend or two"

an unplanned lie

the woman walks in the door

"i love you, Sweets. make sure she goes with her brother"

she says to me, then my social worker

only 2 visits afterwards

im 17 now

it's been 9 years

Every day my heart gets torn from my chest

and I feel the empty pain

that goes with lacking feeling, lacking love,

lacking that person

who understands me through and through,

knows the ins and outs

of my pain and suffering, hopes and sorrows,

that one person

who brings out my best self, and I bring out hers,

but this life

is moving clouds and lightning in the skies,

and I don’t know

what I did to incur this punishment,

the destruction

of my heart and in turn, my mind,

so I lay here

on this cliff side, pondering fate,

and if

one more onlooker says there are other fish,

and if

one more onlooker says I’ll find someone,

I swear

I’ll switch places, and let their heart

be the one

that’s torn out over and over,

see if

their mouths are still full of platitudes,

meaningless

blabbering with no basis in reality.

It was Monday. The machines that marked his breaths, his heart beats, slowed. An unrelieved hum filled the room when his lungs emptied, and his body deflated, motionless. He was no longer. His wife held his lifeless hand, her head upon her bent arm by his side. Nurses who had become friends during his final weeks stood vigil with her. Some cried; some hugged. One put a comforting hand on his wife’s shoulder.

Clearly, it was not with eyes that he saw this. He was dead. And yet, he was there, in the room, hovering, everywhere.

Where was his daughter?

Then, he knew, and in the moment that he knew, he was no longer in the room, but rather, where she was, heavy with child, happy, still ignorant of his passing.

He wondered that he was not elsewhere but gave thanks he could see his baby. If only he could see hers.

Then they were in the hospital and her husband was pale and sickly as he awaited the birth holding her hand and staring at the machine monitoring the baby’s heart, while she sang, loudly, with each contraction.

He watched, waited, till suddenly he felt another presence as incorporeal as his own. And he knew. His grandson.

And as he ceased to be himself and became one with all that is and ever shall be, his grandson took his first breath.

Dying, for me, was a beautiful experience.

I know that sounds crazy, blasphemous even, to describe such a tragic thing, a viscerally sad thing, in such a dissonant way. You might wonder if I was depressed. And truly, I wasn’t. In the end, despite everything, I was stupidly happy. Still, if I was being completely and truly honest, dying, the actual act of it, not the pain or the ragged breathing, no, the actual process of letting go… that part. That part was bliss.

Let me tell you about my life, before I ask you to celebrate in its ending.

It wasn’t a particularly spectacular existence, some might even call it boring, run of the mill. A life that could be mistaken for a thousand others. Of course, to me, at the time, it was everything, the only thing.

I was born in a small Midwestern town, raised in typical Midwestern niceness, by a father who was strict and distant but did his best, and a mother who was a tad too religious but who did all the mothering things with unmatched fervor. I was clothed in clean clothes, my feet adorned with shoes that were sensible and fit well. I was loved and scolded and hugged in all the typical ways. I had two sisters I constantly squabbled with, banging on the shared bathroom door, hastily getting ready for the day in a panic, somebody always holding up the one hairdryer, using up all the hot water.

I loved, oh yes, I loved. Roman, that was his name. I remember thinking his name had that unique way of rolling easily in the curl of my tongue, passing effortlessly through my lips, like I’ve said his name all my life, or that I’m meant to, for the rest of it.

He was brilliant, my Roman. I met him at university, studying astrophysics. He had grand ideas and even grander dreams. He loved life but at the same time was disillusioned by it. He said to me once, using his hands to gesture into space: “It’s not possible, you know, that this is it. There’s more to this, more to everything, we just can’t see it.”

You would think it would hurt, the way he said it, the way he longed for something more than us, more than what I could give him, but it didn’t. Because I knew what he meant, I felt it too.

There was something in between the empty spaces, he told me, between the tiniest of particles. An answer to everything.

I never found out what he meant, neither did he. He died shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday, before he was able to finish his research, before he got to meet his daughter, at that point still the tiniest clump of molecules gestating inside me.

I remember the pain of that moment. How the world became dull and gray. How I went to sleep too many nights hoping to never wake up again. But day after day I woke up, and I would go through the motions, and I would go to work and my prenatal appointments, smiling at my doctor, telling him yes, yes, I’m doing okay. It’s hard, but I’ve got my sisters, you know, and my mom…

Then I had my daughter, and at once the world had color again. She had Roman’s eyes, almond shaped and deeply brown, thick dark lashes swooping downwards at the sides. I swear she looked at me in the exact way Roman did, with that exact slight raise of the brows, the slight curl in the lips, and I remember weeping.

I named her: Aster. Star. The only one that mattered in my universe, my sun.

We had a simple life, our little family of two. We fought a lot, in the way all mothers and daughters do, Aster having the quick wit of her father, the stubbornness of her mother. She broke my heart a million times when she was a teenager, which we mended as we both grew older. Then as quickly as she came into my life, she left. I understood. She had to build a life of her own, having met her own star, her own universe.

And it was good.

“Mom?”

She’s finally here. My star. “Aster.”

Large dark eyes stared down at me. She was older now, my star, smile lines having formed at the corners of her eyes. Have those always been there? They must have. Aster always smiled with her eyes.

“Hey mom, it’s okay. We’re here.”

We. I couldn’t see well these days. She must have brought her little boy, my grandson. I squinted at the small blonde head on her lap. She named him… Roman.

I wanted so much to smile, but it hurt to even breathe. My chest muscles struggled to expand. I saw the nurse put a hand on my daughter’s shoulder, shaking her head.

Yes, there was pain, every single muscle hurt, the air caught uncomfortably in my chest, but there was also something else… something light. Suddenly I felt weightless. I knew then it was time to go.

Time at once contracted then expanded, and I could see everything, the future, the past, all possible choices and universes all at once. I finally saw it, what my Roman was talking about, the space in between the tiniest particles, the invisible energy that connects all of us together, in every universe, in every possible dimension. My universe, my stars.

I died then.

And it was beautiful.

I’m sorry I can’t help you.

All the words of wisdom have been written.

No one wants to hear them anymore.

Chaos has been unleashed and

stupidity are the rule now.

Ignorance and blindness are the leaders

of what once was a great nation.

Humanity is too busy to care about the elderly and innocent of the world.

Where have all the great ones who loved their people enough gone?

To Hell that’s where.

Believers its over. Hell is here and no one lifts a finger to fight against it.

Your children are slaves to the Beast because you allowed it.

No one stands up for what’s right anymore, they all back up and say everything is ok. As long as no one is offended then it’s ok.

I can’t be a straight white older woman with disabilities and disagree with today’s agenda because that may offend some one else. Well what if I’m offended by the nonsense that’s being allowed to go on?

I have Black and Native American heritage but look at me and I am white skinned and redhead because I’m also Scottish.

I raised 4 sons and two of them are gay. I didn’t raise them to be anything other than kind and simple human being. I love them all.

Im finished here. I’m no longer needed or wanted.

The Darkness has Won!