Why?
As soon as the question was asked I had an answer ready, but I let my mind dance around it for some time, anyway. It reminded me of exercises I used to do. Meditation, zen, willpower. What was asked was not what I wanted to answer, though. The 'why' of reason was supposed, but I am far more concerned with the 'why' of 'for what purpose.' So the first ideas bounced around my head. There are many reasons why someone might do something. All sound, logical, sensical explanations. A reason can be found, can be understood, can be accepted. A reason can be believed, can be observed, mostly, can be forced into our scope of comprehension because we are used to it.
The question of purpose makes my mind move in a different manner. It dances through my head a spore on the wind, drawls about as spoken word, slurred and slow, at the very same time racing and screaming back and forth in a box. Faster than comprehension, faster than I picture myself to be able to process, yet I can still fathom.
Why does reading a passage elicit fear, elation, sorrow, anguish? Why do I long for old memories? There exists fragments of emotion, captured and stored for later. Why do I form words to communicate?Why do I struggle? Why am I made to feel a certain way, against my will, against my judgment, against my life? Better to ask why a bee makes honey. Less foolish to ask why a river flows. More pertinent to ask what's next.
The necessity of purpose pulls at me. Questions stab at me, unarmored and unlearned, and I pull the blade deeper. I breathe in the toxin of uncertainty, suck down noxious bile. I swim in the slime of regret, coating my flesh and reminding my form. Again and again, on repeat, always returning. I wonder why. I force upon myself the burden of the past, the weight of the present, the duty of the future. Cumbersome treads the road, a familiar path, no less haphazard than last time, exact and repetitive, yet I stumble in the briars at the precise same location, and I let the thorns prick my fingers just for curiosity, though I already know the result. Madness consumes me and is gone in an instant, washed away in a dark wave, a black tide. Here and gone, now and forever, I stand at the shores of time and I steel myself in the face of the everlasting. Why will never be known. The unknown becomes me. Listless and afraid I persist in torment and somehow, delighted, emerge: reborn knowing the why of it all. There is no why. There is no magic. There is only what has happened and what will continue to happen. I am still here and smiling and that is enough. I am enough. I will always be.
Back to the question at hand.
Why?
Why indeed.
