It Can’t. It Doesn’t.
My life has no objective purpose. It can't. It doesn't.
Factually, all of life is merely a cosmic incident hobbling along bound together by evolutionary duct tape and artifically-imposed patchwork. It works hardly and hardly works in varying degrees.
Scientifically, there is zero evidence, let alone proof, for the existence of a creator. No almighty being put us here and there is simply the almighty being that is living. An afterlife is about as far a reach as the TV remote just when you got comfortable on the couch.
But none of that means my life can't matter. It can. It does.
Along the Forgotten Sidewalk Near Long Road
This is the sidewalk where car accidents don’t happen,
where idiot drivers don’t crash.
This is the pavement where cracks join pebbles,
where no feet walk
and the one memorable sight is cigarette butts.
Insects crawl and fly here soundlessly,
traveling across the suffocating openness.
No people live -- have ever lived -- on this pavement
cracked by time and a grime so obvious
that people power washed it from their memory.
Red Queen
He was running the Red Queen's Race.
He knew better than anyone what it felt like running so hard your lungs mutiny -- wasting all his breath on staying in the same place. He knew better than anyone how feet could thrash the ground and still it looks the same. He knew better than anyone how his fists could pummel the air; despite all the breathing room, he could hardly move.
He knew what it was like being stuck having faith in someone go unreciprocated. Unreciprocated faith like unrequited love.
Myer’s Mire
He stood on the mire, its sweet, sickening aroma intertwining with the tendrilic fog snaking around his boots and up into his nostrils.
He had only a Glock 38 and chicken-scratch’d Waffle House napkin. He withdrew the jotting and cleared his throat, words trickling from his mouth like droplets of condensation down a glass of ice water:
“Too long has this day waited. Too long have I suffered in silence. Too long have I taken shit. Too bad it has to end this way.” Horse flys buzzed above their dung-like mud and crickets chirped their nightly tunes. ”... familiar,” he said. His words pooled at the bottom of the mire, unheard; they were an indistinguishable mug-ring of coffee.
The bullet was out the other side of his head before any eye could even register the gun moving. The bloody heap crumpled to the ground where it mired and made a sucking sound with the mud never heard above the ambience. Inattention like a spear driven deeper and deeper into the corpse.