some guy

one day, he lost his eyes, but he learned to appreciate darkness. He knew that he would no longer see a sunset, but one night he stayed up all night through the cool of the early morning hours and at around 5.46 a.m., he felt a warmth different than anything he'd felt before begin caressing the follicles of his skin. He heard the sound of birds that welcome the sunrise, and their music struck the chords of his soul many degrees deeper than before. He could have sworn he tasted the taste of the morning, that taste that bees gorge on when they gorge on the flowers in the bushes and trees. He smelt the fresh air and thanked god for his breath.

Walking in the city, he tripped on the cracked sidewalks and bumped into other humans. Someone told him to get a stick. That person didn't know his past, how recently he had lost his eyes. Those who knew him spoke only about things that could be seen, movies they had seen, or places they wanted to see. They flipped through magazines and read books that spoke of how things looked.

He couldn't see the wars on t.v. but he could still hear the pleas of the interviewed. The television still reproduced an accurate representation of the bombs and shots ringing in the distant lands beyond his reach. As his ears grew sharper, he listened to the words of those around him, and the contempt they felt for others as they destroyed others images in gossip.

"They aren't all bad..." he repeated to himself, and he smiled as he heard the longing in someone's voice, or the laughter of another, or the word love, and the word peace, and the word brother. In time he learned to tell hypocrisy from sincerity. Somewhere beneath the images and colors, there was a palpable soul in the words they spoke.

Then one day, as he crossed Main Street from 7-11 sometime in the evening (he couldn't tell what time it was, exactly, except for the atmospheric temperature), a man demanded someone else's wallet, said give or I'll shoot you motherf---er, and the rustle of the victims hands struggling for his wallet in the back pocket got intertwined with the gasps and sighs of the people around, and the thief, as to make them all look away, shot the victim, and he, blind, was right there, three feet away from the gun and the thief and the victim falling in the dark of his eyes, except, he could not hear him falling, not beneath the awful ringing that seemed to reverberate in the empty temple of his mind.

After the ringing subsided, he heard no more voices nor bird songs in the early morning. And people generally left him alone, for in the early weeks he yelled to be heard, and later on he refused to speak, as when he spoke nobody seemed to be listening.

How he made it after that, deaf and blind as he was, beats me. I never knew the guy. I just knew of him through the friend of a friend...