Article & Art by Linnea Anderson
Some people walk with a purpose. He didn’t.
He meandered. He worked that way, picking up sticks and thinking of God. He sought to uncover what always was; there and bare.
It wasn’t only some strange illusion, or a puzzle waiting jumbled. It was a web that expected no resolution.
It wasn't a fight or an undying urge to understand. Wonder or curiosity didn’t do his deeds justice. It was simply juvenile, silly, and confounding: his process.
Clichés did not grip him. To him, an olive branch meant nothing about peace.
It didn’t break norms. It didn’t leave people questioning. He just worked that way, no end in sight, none needed.
And so he twiddled through his days sinking into what plainly was, thinking of nothing more, and things made less and less sense.
He rarely fell into the why. The Why was far too much, too deep, and too serious. It expected something definitive.
He understood that everything he knew, even what he saw plainly, would soon be torn up and carried away with what he called wind. It just worked that way: the web.
Without a footing, he still found interest in shallow things. Simplicity was disturbingly thoughtful. He had his preferences; clarity and stillness.
You couldn’t call him lost, or even confused. He had a better understanding of his world than you.
People thought little of his brains and dinky demeanor. He absorbed all the attention in the room, harnessed it, used it to see others, and no one studied him.
Clean nails, well-shaven, and clear-headed, he stayed true to being a part of the web. Although slightly tangled, he was never caught.
Far from a robot, he was viciously human. That was the danger of it, in the web at least.
He sought no goals but to think. It did him in.
Never satisfied or even concerned with solutions, his method, even his full life, was consumed. It plagued him, a nothingness birthed by a tremendous understanding of chaos and complexity. It all existed within him, all that he could grasp with his limited senses. With the perfectly painted picture he formed within his head, he saw holes. Ones that reminded him of childhood restlessness and fervor. It tore at him, those imperceivable elements.
God was easy. God thought and functioned. What was more was what was stupid. Infuriatingly real, he never truly grasped all that was dumb.
Disillusioned as he was, desperation took its toll and the long road back turned short.
He stumbled one day and that was it, the whole map. It wasn’t bloody, just bare.
Now the web is somewhere deep in a yard, a lawn covered with big old stones and big old names.
He would be one of them but no one knew him well enough. They only knew what the paper said folded up in his back pocket. In thin delicate letters, soon to be weathered away or covered by moss, the sentiment read the same, word for word, on his headstone.
“Oh why, oh why.”