Geometry for Ocelots

by Exurb1a

He looked to the years behind and saw a featureless, beige corridor. He looked to the future and saw an identical corridor stretching ahead. Endless hours in the moksha flowers, tilling and sowing, tilling and sowing. Endless hours in the oak tree, drinking and looking—looking and not seeing. Hearing and not listening; forever the perpetual, stinging, unnamed sense at the back of his mind that he lived inside a brain too small to understand or even witness the true beauty of the world, and so the only option left was to languish in the self-imposed illusion that objects and errands and little fears and little hopes were the full extent of being alive, else go mad. And Mama, gone. And the winters cold. And every day just comfortable enough to bear the next, and barely. Then death.