wanderer above the sea of fog

When the boy was about twelve, he ran away from home.

It wasn't for the usual reasons. He had wonderful parents, a handful of siblings to play with, and a good education. They lived in a nice house on a nice street, and life was good. They never lacked for anything.

“Suffering builds character,” his art teacher said once, very impressively. He’d been in a war, though he never specified which war, and had come back home to teach kids how to paint. The boy thought that the teacher probably knew what he was talking about, and that this is probably why his paintings never impressed the teacher no matter how hard he tried. There was no character in his art.

This feeling of not being enough grew and grew. He felt almost like he blended into the background, with nothing to distinguish him from the people surrounding him.

To his twelve-year-old mind, this of course meant that he needed suffering. And to him, suffering meant not being able to go home, that most comfortable and safe place, where he lacked nothing.

So he packed a backpack with food, books, and clothes, then set off a little after dinner-time when his parents were distracted with the dishes. He made it down three streets before his feet turned around of their own accord. He was back in his bed, silent and shaking under the blankets, before his parents noticed he was gone.

And this is how he learned that he was afraid of suffering, that he would save himself any pain if he could. It hurt that he couldn’t build character, that the teacher’s eyes would simply slide over him, but he had realized it wasn’t worth the cost.

Of course, he couldn’t always stay safe. He got his first real taste when he was hurrying to get out of the winter rain, slipped on a patch of ice, and broke his arm. The pain was a shock, and the weeks of itchy immobility were miserable.

When his arm was finally healed, he drew himself sitting at endless windows, as many as would fit in the canvas. When he brought it to class, the teacher glanced at it and pronounced it as “acceptable.”

A few years later, when a gang of schoolyard bullies attacked him and stole his new bicycle, he went home and doodled a picture of his attackers, miniature, standing in the palm of his hand, helpless at his mercy. When he went to show it to the teacher, the older man looked for long moments and called it “striking, certainly.” But he said it heavily, as if the feelings the boy had poured into the paper were weighing on him.

Suffering was a weight, the boy came to realize some years after that, when his father and older brother caught deep chest colds. One week, they were coughing and burning up, and the next they were gone. The boy, a young man now, kissed their foreheads and sent them away, and knew that he would always carry them with him. They would slow his steps, drag on his thoughts.

He painted his mother, himself, and his remaining younger siblings sitting at the table, with two extra chairs that would now always sit empty. He thought that his old teacher would probably like this one, but he didn’t have the time to go show it to him, busy now with a job to keep a roof over their heads and food on their plates.

Many, many years later, when his siblings were all grown up and had left to seek their fortunes, when his mother had followed his father into the dark earth, the man sat down to paint again. It was hard, as he hadn’t painted for so long. But slowly, the colors and movements came back to him. So too did the memory of his old teacher, who was most likely gone by now as well.

He thought of what the teacher had once said, and of what suffering had built for him, and painted himself on a journey through a sea of fog. Mountains stood in the way, and he’d climbed high enough to look across to the next, and the next, and the next. They stood there, waiting, looming out of the fog as distant and unknowable giants.

That done, he left his house, that most comfortable and safe place, and never looked back.