The Glass Wall

Everyday I trudge to work past a window shielding one slice of chocolate cake from the world. I am always dirty, tired, and overburdened by equipment, but the slice of cake reminds me of a haven somewhere lush and green. The glass window is smudged at the level of a child’s face and hands, and the cake sits atop a crystal cake platter with a long neck so that every side of the slice but the back is visible.

When the shop first opened, I paid little attention to it. “Matilda Bakery” painted in bright red averted my eyes like a rich man averts his eyes from haggardness. But routine dampens the senses and eventually I half-heartedly explored the bakery from afar, discovering those perfectly stenciled letters, the perpetually smudged glass, and the perfect piece of chocolate cake.

Now when I walk by, all I see is the chocolate cake. The cake takes me somewhere else for a few seconds of my commute when I imagine myself with a spoon, fork or only hands, voraciously eating and smearing chocolate all over my face. Other times I imagine giving the slice of cake to a child, my child, and watching as his face glow with an excitement I never knew.

My father said that a parent’s job was to raise their child better than they were raised—materially, emotionally, and mentally. He thought that every generation deserved to be better off than the previous one, and that society could achieve this by working hard. Well, I work hard and I have no children. But dreams do not die easily, time remains.

I always wanted a family of my own, an opportunity to prove to my deceased patriarch I too could patriarchic-ally pass on wisdom. But by life’s grace I have worked with my hands since early on, and a steady woman was never more attainable than Matilda’s chocolate cake.

For a long time this made me angry, bitter and cold towards the world. How could a life with incredible riches, bounteous promise, and unbounded potentiality turn its back on me? This cake and all the ads showing other people smiling as though the overlords sell happiness instead of toothpaste have emptied me of the capacity to understand how to change my existential disposition to build back better.

Every day I hurt, and when I hurt I cannot work. I have been dragging a cart for years without help because the overlords think me disposable. My overlords do not care how I feel as much as how I act; now every night I drink to forget. My neighbor distils great stuff and shares it generously. It’s strong and clear and goes down like water.

My oldest brother went blind because of this stuff, my cousin had a stroke and my neighbor shot himself. This moonshine is an evil spirit which invigorates and possesses the body, granting powers that some might consider unnatural. Down the street a man survived unscathed from a direct hit by a car, and another mate punched through a cement wall with only one bloody knuckle.

This moonshine spirit deletes pain, and now everyone knows the secret. A whole club of us exists, we drink and get merry, we know the nighttime nature of humanity is a Dionysian madness of indulgence and escapism and we laugh thunderously in its presence. Uninitiated think us mad but they do not know unbridled bliss, and they will never understand us unless they plunge into the irrational, self-destructive side of humanity. But they never will, because they belong to the group of people who want to break my back. We talk about it as the lift lowers and the lights dim, and as we swing pick axes and listen to canaries sing.

In younger years moonshine and exercise was unparalleled in stimulation. I learned how powerful an agent of change physical bodies can be, and so I never cared much about school. Frustration was all I learned in school; trying to explain our physical world with words and theorems only subtracts from the physical experience. Their “knowledge” is an artificial layer of complexity separating me from true existence. So I exercised, and I created a human highly capable of altering the physical world through strength and endurance, intimidation and power—all without their knowledge.

I thought I lived the ideal life, until I began trudging instead of strutting to work. It was then I realized people also live comfortably and imposingly just repairing and servicing the lift; and maybe they have more time, energy, and attentiveness for a family composed of people and not of spirits.

Soon after I thought about changing by attending a church, a brothel, or committing suicide. But I am too numb to change, or care. I spurned church again like I did as a teen because a lavish house of grace, love, and forgiveness seems like pompous theatre placed there to curb what make me powerful. About brothels, even ghosts are welcome there and I am uninterested. Suicide I gave thought but something holds me back, the fear of death, or maybe senses to survive, are the only thing more powerful than moonshine spirits. Last year I was in a brigade caught by a collapsing tunnel, but safely sprinted with my pickaxe through falling rubble and out the other side—unlike many comrades who without a strong fear of death, succumbed to it. I wish that someone aside from the moonshine spirit cared about my story.

Sometimes my codependence on that bravado, macho feeling of survival and victory against stark odds makes me feel pitiful; but in its midst I forget the pain and moonshine. Perhaps I discovered too early that survival senses are stronger than moral, metaphysical, or epistemic senses. But I cannot un-know that only one sense keeps me safe in perilousness!—the survival sense and its perfect equilibrium between strain and relaxation, its perfection in interacting with life!

Part of me thinks masculinity is why I love this survival instinct, a perfectly balanced rush of stress and performance; my masculine body is built to project power onto the physical world and for the adrenaline to do battle then come home in glory wielding the proverbial beast’s head. I am made for battle, for the hazardous unknown, and that is why every time I strike and shatter a rock, my masculinity rewards me for its fleeting victory in a war of attrition versus the outside world.

But each morning I yearn with a meek fervor to discover something beyond this war, and I pass the slice of chocolate cake and feel a seedling grow up from the darkness within me. Maybe virtuosity is a way to break the cycle of battle plus nighttime, merry-making recovery drills.

Maybe I could leave the mine, get a better job, and find a woman and make a family with her, with sons or daughters—just people I can give slices of chocolate cake. Apollo would grace me with his presence, and I can pass days in the fields, hunting and feeding my people. Maybe if I escape this place I will rediscover daytime innocence, forget the battle and focus on a life outside of pain and pickaxes.

Maybe if I separate myself from moonshine spirits and genuinely investigate who I am, I can find a soothing, organic strength to transcend the pain. I can transmute my barren shaft of rocks and moonshine into an Eden of green growth; I can walk well-trodden paths through the foliage in comfort, safety, and beauty. Maybe I will find the Eden I was told about as a child, and stop stumbling through vacuous mines, and my family and I can pose in an ad for happiness.

The only dark thing in my life then would be chocolate cake, or maybe eyes of a beloved child. I could gaze into them instead of this abyssal shaft, and I could battle for them instead of purely for survival. Maybe they could revive in me the tenderness I lost years ago as a child, and maybe they could pull me out of this shaft I am in.

But a part of me thinks “I am in this shaft by my own power, and I must get out of this shaft by my own power.” And another part of me wonders “is this worth abandoning the familiarity of your war?” The voices echo loudly off rocky walls and each time I hear a subsequent unhappiness with the state of things develops.

I want to blame society and tell everyone that I was raised in the wrong place, that my inability to achieve is because I belong in the wild and not a confined shaft. I am seething, and perhaps anger is my true pain. No one ever listened to me, they simply trembled at my stature. The standards for you and me never matched because people weren’t afraid to tell you to change. No one ever told me I would end up tired, alone, and overworked if I did not cultivate more than my physicality.

I could be more calm and reserved to fate if in my cries of agony from trying battles, you acknowledged that I too perceive the problems created by an immature, antiquated version of me. But instead you dismiss me as my own enemy, say my problems exist because of moonshine and that without it, I would cease sinking into the abyssal shaft.

At first I listened to the comments and separated myself from the moonshine spirit for a couple years, but all I felt was loneliness; no one acknowledged my effort to cultivate virtuosity. All anyone did was push me to perform better, but I did not know in regards to what, and I am respected amongst miners. I rejoined the moonshine spirit a decade ago and regret nothing except that those callous judges will never see the hollowness of their fallacious interjections on my life.

I wish you, taskmaster and judge, were real so I could avenge the dignity you whip, the rowdiness you imprison, and the sympathies you deny me. I wish that I could eat chocolate cake, I wish to taste it just once. I know there will never be chocolate cake in my world, and I will be teased every day, but I cannot give up dreaming of a fight to feed my kid cake.

My nightly dreams depict the path to what I want but I awake too groggy to remember the routes and faces. The veil between who I am and who I want to be is thin like the glass pane separating me from the slice of chocolate cake at “Matilda Bakery.” I can see what I want, but an invisible wall blocks me.

I might have my peace if I knew there was a door to find. I understand I was born on the wrong side of the glass wall and am predisposed to behave and make choices which keep me here, and that those choices led to lifestyles and worldviews different from the other side. But I still do not understand why the glass insists on tortuous displays of bounty I will never have.

Maybe I will morph into a butterfly and flutter out of this shaft, and never be enslaved by the fight to survive. I could float freely in the breeze, drunk on nectar and the wind. The only spirit I would know is of Mother Nature, and I could bring joy to children by landing on flowers and flapping my wings. This is my dream, and perhaps tonight the spirit of freedom will find me.