The Capacity for Patience

Nobody said that my life was going to be easy. Nobody said it was going to be hard either, and they were right. My life was neither easy nor hard. Nobody ever said much of anything in my presence, even when they did, it was usually by chance. I was not but a stone for most of my existence and nobody has much reason to say to a boulder. I saw people very rarely, in those earlier parts of my life. It is difficult to tell time as a stone, things that can move about freely always seemed to do so with a speed I couldn’t fathom. After the dust settled, the fires cooled and rain began to fall regularly, softer creatures than stones or trees, animals, began to wander out of the ocean. More fires, bigger stones and ice took away the first ones, but they were soon replaced with other, smaller animals. Some of those animals said nothing, only passed me by with silent acknowledgement of where I was. Others gathered around me, they squeaked and chattered their fast, unintelligible words as their tiny paws scrabbled up my warm, rough skin. I always liked the squirrels. They never had any reason to break smaller stones off of me.

Not like the ones who came next. They were shaped like squirrels, but they were much bigger. They spoke more slowly, and stopped to rest by my form for longer periods, so I was able to discern their language over millions of years. I learned their words alongside them, discovering new ones every time the ‘men’ as they called themselves stopped and leaned back against my surface. They broke pieces from me at first, and I learned to fear them. They would take smaller stones from my overhangs or hammer pieces out with tools of other stones. My budding children were granted life as they were torn from my womb, doomed to short lives as chisels and arrowheads in service to these wandering apes. I didn’t cry for them, not even after the men in hoods made from animal skins and blood paint on their faces came. They came without warning one morning and spoke different words. Words that stirred the air they travelled through with invisible light and penetrated my mind. Words that woke me up.

The men did not come back after they granted me thought. They left, probably with the intention to bring more of their people to see the wonder of the thinking boulder. Perhaps they planned to turn me into a weapon, mold me into a nightmare to crush their enemies. I never found out because they never came back. I like to think that their enemies found a way to crush them first. I didn’t hate the men who woke me up. I had no reason to. My life would probably have been simpler if I had remained as ignorant as my brothers and sisters in the forest, but not by much. I was still a boulder, immense and unmoving. I could no more control my fate than the dirt around me could have pushed me out of it. But I did have time to think.

I thought about what it meant to be me, to be a stone in a world that had long since been given to the animals. I thought about all kinds of things, the fiery chaos of my birth, the long silence that had come after. The animals that had gone and been replaced. I wondered what animals men would be replaced with once they’d gone.

I thought about what I could do, after I discovered that I did have limited control over myself. Very limited, as there was only one action that I was capable of taking, and while it would have resulted in the birth of many more of my children, it would also be the end of me. I could build or lessen the pressure within myself. I didn’t think anyone could have seen it, but I didn’t have the need to see anything. I could feel the tension between every individual mineral of my form stretch this way or that, depending on if I added or released pressure within myself. I knew the danger of what I was doing when I saw the first crack. The only crack I would give myself. The fissure in my hide snapped open, only a few millimeters deep, but enough that I decided I would not try to move again. Not until I was finished with my time in this world, and not unless I could use my death for a purpose.

Lots of men passed my resting place over the years wearing different animal skins every time. After they’d apparently decided to stop going about with their own bare skin and ordinary fur, they tried clothing made from woven plants, then later shiny suits of refined mineral that covered their whole body. Later they would come in matching, brightly colored outfits, before they all transitioned to a darker green uniform that looked like the surrounding trees. They were always causing a ruckus after they passed me. They would pause by my spot and speak about what they were going to do next. They would speak new words before me, words like ‘honor’, ‘duty’ and ‘sacrifice’. Those were the men that gave me the idea to use my death for a purpose, because after these instances where men would give speeches to other men before me, they would come back. I don’t know where they went, but there were always fewer coming back. Some of the men who came back were smaller than I remembered, like they were missing pieces. I deduced that the men who had not returned must have died. I learned the meanings of the new words and finally started to understand. Sacrifice. I knew I would have to die one day. All things eventually did, everything is replaced by the universe eventually. The men would one day be replaced, I knew that and somehow, I think they did too. I think that was why they rushed off to die. Living the faster life of an animal must have given them all kinds of purposes to die for, it was good that there were enough of them to do so. But I was a boulder. I did not rush about the forest, I did not have lots of purposes. What I did have was patience, and thanks to the men who woke me up, I also had agency. I resolved to wait, there in my hole in the ground, and one day, my patience would be rewarded and I would be shown something worth dying for.

That was before the Grinder came. I hadn’t seen any men in years and I began to think that they had all been replaced. There weren’t any new animals to take their place, there were still squirrels and birds, albeit far fewer than when I was younger. Over the course of a few thousand years after I’d seen the last man, a distant hum had begun to grow into existence far outside of my field of influence. I had no idea what it was, it persisted for years and it eventually surrounded me, as if I were suddenly within a ring of beehives just beyond the nearest trees.

Suddenly, they were surrounding me. The first men I’d seen in years, wearing bright clothing and shouting. They had much bigger tools than the ones they’d made from my children so long ago. To my shock and everlasting horror, they dug at the earth beneath me. They pulled at my sides with ropes and heavy belts. Stop! I wished I could scream to them, You’re going to widen the crack! But I was not created with a mouth to speak, nor did the men who woke me deign to provide me with one before they left. The new men hauled me free of the my home of so many countless eons. They pushed me into the maw of some beast of steel and teeth. It ground away at my flesh, such agony I’d never had the cause to feel before. My mind stopped working for a long time after that.

When I awoke for the second time, my body was different. Changed. They’d added some kind of binding agent to keep me intact and reshaped me. I didn’t feel natural anymore. I had been shaped into straight lines and geometric shapes. Holes had been bored into my flesh to allow the passage of wires, and I know had an iron skeleton giving me strength. I was tall, taller than I thought even trees could be. And I was somewhere else. My body, my mind was spread across this gargantuan structure, but it wasn’t all me. My section was only along a few walls, ceilings and floors in the center. Those words were new to me as well, but my new life was so much nearer to humans that I picked up on their words much more quickly than I had in the past. Wall was their word for where most of “me” was, a sheer cliff face between two raised sections of stone stacked above one another, the floor on the bottom and the ceiling on the top. It was disorienting. It was nauseating in ways I couldn’t have imagined before. Why couldn’t they have just killed me with the Grinder, I thought, let my children exist unmoving in this wall?

Where I’d once felt nothing for the humans, I soon grew to hate them. I quickly learned more of their language, and that ‘men’ referred only to the angry ones who often had to be restrained and taken away by others, and ‘women’ referred to the ones who shouted at the men taking away their men, and wept when it was over. They made me hate humans, I knew there were many more surrounding me. They couldn’t all have been bad, but the ones I was near were despicable. Twisted and torn as I was, I was still a stone. I could not reserve love for some humans and hate only these, all I could do was hate. The men fought, hurt even killed other men, the women fought each other and screamed at the men to stop fighting. Sometimes the men would fight the women, then suddenly the fighting would cease. Like this was some low the depraved creatures would not stoop to if they could help it.

It only took a few of their generations for my attitude towards them to deteriorate in tandem with my body. I’d seen humans take care of the things they’d taken from the forest. I watched men with long swords stroke the blade gently with a whetstone or oil. I’d seen women resting in my shade mending tears in clothing. For some reason, the humans who’d taken me didn’t feel the need to take care of me in the same way. Grime clung to my surfaces, smaller humans covered me with haphazard paint. Garbage and filth were everywhere, in my body and surrounding me. At least the refuse on the forest floor of my entire life was all supposed to be there. Humans brought all kinds of things inside me, I guess I was filling the role of their home. Gone were the days of bows and spears, now humans brought in filthy bits of sustenance wrapped in solidified chemicals. They would stay inside for days at a time, growing fat, enabling disease, being horrible to each other. And to me.

I almost didn’t notice when the crack reappeared. The mixing with the boding agent had removed all physical blemishes from my form, and I had all but given up the idea of having any control over my death. What was worse, though I still retained some agency from the men who woke me up, I had apparently had my lifeless body rearranged in such a way that I was less brittle. I and all of the stones that had been crushed to make this monstrosity were so hollow that we swayed with the breeze that surrounded us. I could still move a little but not enough to produce a new crack. Thankfully, though, the humans who lived along side me saw to that themselves.

There was a loud noise one night. One of the men had done something to one of the others, hit him very hard from far away. The other man fell to the ground and began losing he blood all over the floor. My floor. On the other side of the fallen man, unnoticed by the screaming women and shouting men, a small metal pebble had lodged into the side of one of my faces. The crack was much bigger than the one I’d produced on my own. This one hurt. It must have been the blood on the pebble from when it passed through the other man. It let me feel his pain. It was excruciating. I hated that other man so much, I wanted him gone, out of my walls. But the other humans, the ones who came and took the loudest ones away, didn’t come. The man who’d killed another man was apparently so frightening to the other humans that he was allowed to remain. The other humans avoided looking at him, didn’t go near him. He laughed often, told others that he was the “king of the castle”. If only he knew how much the castle loathed him. Wanted him dead.

This was it, I knew. This was the purpose that I’d been waiting so long for. I didn’t care about the other humans, the dead man, the screaming women. All I wanted was for this man to die, and I wanted to be the rock to do it. I knew I could do it. It would only take a little patience.

A new woman came in one day. She was the new woman who was living in my section of the building. She wasn’t any different to the others, except that she didn’t scream like the rest of them. It must have been those little object they held to the middle of their arms that made them scream, because she didn’t do that either. Men seemed to follow her when it was dark, but she didn’t seem to ever notice. I was overjoyed. If men wanted her, that would mean the king would want her too. The lesser men fled at his approach, and the woman, just like the others, blinded herself from the danger he presented. Soon enough, he was living with her, spreading his filth into her world and ending my blessed reprieve from the garbage of humans. He stayed even after he started hitting her, not that that took long. Not that she could have done anything about it anyway.

They lived like that for some time. The king would lie around, generating grime about himself as the woman slowly deteriorated. Soon, she wasn’t any different from the others in any way. She screamed just as loudly as they did. For the third time in my life, an infinity of experience for a boulder, I found it unbearable. The human corruption, the endless wailing, the blood constantly spattering my walls. I wouldn’t let it spread to me any longer. I had to do something about them, and I had to do it soon. By their measure of time, not by mine.

In the eyes of a boulder, I had to wait no time at all for the screaming and the hitting to resume. She was screaming. He was trying to hit her but she kept moving away. He pursued her across my floors, up to and away from my walls, into one of my corners. He hit her then, and the screaming grew only louder.

She kept moving out of the way, and his fists began to strike the walls. My walls. Suddenly, he was screaming too, shrieking just as loudly as the woman he sought to destroy. She started to hit him back, but then he punched her in the stomach. He took her head in his hands and he heaved it against my stone face with all of his strength. Her head split open like a stump. Blood covered the old bullet hole, hidden by three coats of paint. The woman’s head stuck to the wall for a few moments, or perhaps she was still alive, using the last of her strength to stand defiantly against her attacker. I didn’t care about her, all that mattered to me was that she was still standing there. If she hadn’t given it yet, that meant the man would attack until she did. Unthinking, he swung his bestial fist to the blood covered section of wall that lay exposed, surrounded by the smashed remains of the woman’s face. At the center of that stone wall, the man’s fist connected with the very same bullet with which he had ended the life of another all those years ago. The impact pushed the little lead pebble just a few more millimeters into my flesh. It was all I needed.

The fist sunk into a fissure in my face as I heaved. Loose rocks, they weren’t my children but somehow still me, collapsed around his hand and crushed the bones of his hand. The man screamed in agony, but my purpose was already in motion. The building around us groaned. The man tried to wrench his hand free but I had him now, and I wasn’t letting go. My face shook with glee, the crack spread to my floors and the ceiling. Loose rocks, children from my neighbors below began to fall down into the chamber beneath us. Soon, my own floor was breaking, and while the man’s feet dangled down into that chamber when his weight lost all support, I kept firm hold of his hand. The shaking grew, I kept pushing my agency harder. More pieces of myself began to fall from the ceiling. One of them landed exactly where I wanted it to, directly onto the upturned face of the king. I didn’t let go but I knew my mission was accomplished. I wasn’t satisfied. I could hear other humans around me screaming, calling for help and screaming to each other. The crack ran along all the stones of the building, and soon, we were all slipping free of each other. It eventually came back to me and passed low across my face before picking back up and moving on. Finally, I felt what it was like to smile.