Shroud Of Doubt. An Inner Journey Through the Seasons of Life

First, you should not know your final destination under any circumstances. Each of us has the right to be aimless wanderers on this vast expanse of earth, to make meaningful connections, to believe in the essence of existence envisaging in the firmament of the blue sky. Ever since I started thinking about death, I stopped thinking about life in all its forms. No matter how hard I tried to come back, the fetid clouds of black relentless smog always found their Machiavellian way to break into me wherever I went.

Therefore, I am not sure if this is still reality or not. I wake up amid the train's locomotion, animated by its punishing power to pulverise all notions I have ever had about life. As if someone had a lot of guts to put me here out of the blue without letting me know why. Head glued to the blotted window; butt comfortably occupying the widest seat ever; sweltering sticky air makes my T-shirt look like a wet floor cleaning rag. I navigate through the tiniest threads of uncertainty, forcing my mind to think whilst on the go.

‘No ticket?’

‘Sorry sir. I must’ve forgotten it. By the way, where is this train going?’

‘You’re on the train and you don’t know where it’s going? Nice one, buddy. I’ll have to issue a fine ticket and you get off at the next station, fellow!’

‘Fine. Wherever that might be…’

After handing me a sheet of paper with his scrawls, the bearded ticket collector disappeared as swiftly as he appeared.

I sigh aloud as my thoughts turn to the railroad tracks. I can only see miles of green stretching to the horizon and sheep staring at me as if they wanted to tell me something. Spring flowers are in full bloom in the fields; the buzzing of flies and bees reaches my ears, aided by the rainbow colours of butterfly’s wings. I sneeze as the excess pollen curls in my nostrils, and this seems to be my only human instinct here. Why did all apples always taste like pears and bananas?

The train speeds up as it approaches the next station, so I settle myself on the velour seat like a Lord. I'd rather be shamelessly forgotten than become the highlight of the evening.

Unanswered questions swirl in my head, threatening to find the fuse at the slightest opportunity. Nothing to lose or just lost everything? I do not recognise the surroundings of this trip, nor the time when I got here. It must’ve been a while since I stepped into this effervescent emulating engine. I remember nothing.

I reach into my pants hip pocket. To my great surprise, I find a tiny key there that seems to fit into some jewellery box. “How did it get here? I don’t remember anything!” I’m searching for traces of my luggage, but it looks like the rack above my head is tragically empty. “So, what exactly does this key open?”

The sharp, dull thud behind my seat immediately refreshes my senses. I turn around. One of the young girls, looking thirteen, straightens her legs as she accompanies her little sister in the consumption of a train snack. I can smell the wasabi scent encroaching me like German soldiers, although the girls speak Spanish. I can't decipher the meaning of the words, so my head is drowning in its own flow, with no clear direction, like this train that I mysteriously found myself on.

I dredge up childhood memories. Those endless weekend afternoons of cycling trips, hunting for snails, spiders, and worms and shaking them in a jar to fool their primitive senses. My schoolmate Jake always felt guilty and tried to free them in the aftermath of an earthquake, but it was always too late. The bewildered bugs buggered off to the ground, but they either fought or swayed like drunkards, making Jake wane and wallow like mummy’s boy. “What a sensitive soul he was. I’ve never thought about it fore!”

I once ran into a fox on my way home from Jake’s house. It came right at me. I only had time to scream terribly, waking up all the dogs in the neighbourhood. The animal disappeared within a minute, leaving me dazed and dumbfounded like those bugs in the jar. I never told anyone about it for fear of being ridiculed.

When I was late for home as usual, my father generously prepared for me an award worth every star in this summer night sky. From his wardrobe he took the widest and heaviest belt with studs protruding like daggers from a samurai holster. I knew because he was panting mercilessly like a pig, and only climbing the first floor of our cavernous house was able to cause it. He was thrashing me hard before I passed out. It must’ve happened because the next thing I remember was lying in my own bed with a tremendously stabbing pain in my legs and buttocks. When I looked under the covers, in the glow of the bedside lamp on the table I saw numerous purple-tinged welts writhing and shimmering like electric eels. I had to close my mouth, biting my fist rowdily so as not to make a sound and get my father back for his joyous repetition, as had happened many times in the past. In all these years of molestation by my father, I learned all the logical lessons of this game.

These cracks on the door resemble honeycombs. The glass shattered as dad pressed his mighty fist against it. The idea of wearing ugly glasses was far from my teenage dreams. I felt that correct vision would kill me, cease my activity, or worse, provoke monsters I was never keen to see. Will they come for me now, when I feel like a child again, defenceless in this train going nowhere among others seen for the first time in my life with new eyes? Honestly, all these years I am still sitting in this bathroom with my panic-stricken head hidden in my sweaty palms, counting the monsters of all my time.

The old lady sits down in the chair across from me. It’s weird. There was no station on the way, so where did she come from? She wears a wide-brimmed straw hat to match her broad smile. Her flowery dress radiates with the brilliance of the air outside the window. Summer at its zenith.

I remember a line that stretched from your gently sculpted chin to the line of the nose and followed the fine lines encircling your eyes, and then extended to the menacing looking lines forming a frown. You were never angry, just lost in your train of thought, chewing on every word I had to say to you. There weren't many of them, but you always seemed lost, as if words meant more to you than they do to most people. I always wondered why. When cancer dared to ruthlessly take away our joy of life, I watched you withering away from this world. I remember it quite well because it was the first time that I entered this land of eternal darkness.

When my mother died a few years later, which was unexpected, because she was supposed to live forever, as she always liked to tell us, nothing was the same. Left alone in the huge house after my father died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, she had nothing to live for. Even then I was living alone, taking my first steps in life as a qualified technician. My sister committed suicide on her eighteenth birthday. What a dramatic way to deal with your maturity, don’t you think? Soon after, my mother fell ill with coronary heart disease. She then underwent quite effective therapy, but her childhood heart could not grow enough to cope with adulthood. Plus, she liked to eat fatty foods in large amounts, such as butter, lard, and eggs, clogging her veins, so that was her final straw.

And then the sun-drenched geraniums on Mrs. Leocadia’s balcony from under the seven. They looked like rusty leaves in the park in autumn, though they looked the same all year round. The grey fibres of their leaves, often eaten by pests, begged for attention that she could never give them.

‘No more cooking oil!’

The scream brought me back to my family home, but no one is articulating it. “Who does this familiar voice belong to?” Through my mind’s eye, I see my mother trying to convince my obese father to live a healthier life. With stubborn people it is never feasible, not even in the name of saving their lives. These memories seared into my brain like wounds that need urgent healing, but were left to die and covered with a layer of coarse dust.

Suddenly I see myself at the airport where my leg squeals after close contact with the metal detector. I got injured during the coldest winter in history. I fell onto the ice near my school on the massive slope of a hill that was a popular slide at the time. It was the greatest shame to miss this place! After femoral fracture surgery, I felt like an old man. Having a thighbone broken with a rigid intramedullary nail at the age of ten made me equal to seniors after knee replacement surgery. So, my physical retirement started early in my life. After all this, as I vaguely remember, my lonely life has never been the same. I broke my tailbone then too, which still hurts me every day, but this comfortable armchair makes my life much easier.

I hear the loud noise again. A group of teenage girls carry out the process of destruction. Some jump on the seats, others tear off the velour, revealing the bare wood. It’s a double-decker train, so they have a lot of work to do. They laugh, shout, and mock the other passengers and me, being ornery and vicious, vile and vulgar, bold in boasting and calling names. If they don't tear the seats apart, they paint them with bright red lipstick and nail varnish of the same colour as the graffiti painters worth of their time. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. “So, is it real or not?” I ask my confused head again, and in the absence of an answer, dig my head in my shoulders, pretending to be invisible, and they leave me alone. I’m starting to think I’m really invisible, but the ticket collector saw me, so it doesn’t add up.

After some time, when the music of these uncomfortable voices had died down for good, I decide to take a walk. I see nothing but blood, blood on everything in this murderous train: chairs, corridors, windows and window frames, even on the snow-covered ground where the train stopped. “So, it’s blood, not lipstick or nail varnish?” The train finally stopped, though it happened in the most precarious circumstances imaginable: in the middle of nowhere, where the desert meets the coal mine, and no soul seeks salvation in circles of yellow light.

I was left to my own devices. I look at the traces of blood as if from a massacre or a hunt, although no corpses or carcasses are visible, only snow as pure as heroin surrounding the fields. And yet someone is lying on the tracks in the distance, as if a speeding train had bounced its body off the surface. Everything I've ever been through seemed to fall apart; the door handles fell off; the windows lie shattered into the tiniest particles resembling pieces of ice.

On the only window left in one piece, I read the letters of the word LIVE from the back, as if scrawled by a child's chaotic hand. I realise what a tiny key is for, as if from a jewellery box. It has opened the gates of EVIL as the flip side of life since I jumped on this rabid, revealing ride. It’s time to get off this train called life. Too many calamities have come to light too close to me. I just hope the next stop will be much more mirthful. Death, my dear friend, has always walked with me hand in hand, constantly turning that glistening golden gout of my blood into the gruesome gravity of grey. This is the best summary of naivety, fear, sadness, and anger that has happened in my life.

– THE END –

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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