The world we live in is no one’s.
That was the truth I had chosen to follow when I was freshly seventeen, the one I embroidered delicately across the cloth of my soul. Despite what lies are planted into our heads as infants, the world is out of our infinitesimal palms, always colliding with the infinity between.
Alone, I sit upon a rooftop, rummaged and barren with empty bottles and soda glasses scattered about. The wind licks at my ankles, youthful feet thousands above the cement maze below. I am as close to owning the world as anyone could be, seeing each soul below scatter trying to obtain something that can never be such.
A businessman cradles his briefcase as he strolls idly across the street, his shoulder struggling to keep his phone tied to his ear. His face stitches a smile, cheeks brightening at the tones rising from the phone. Perhaps his big break is finally in reach of his nimble fingers, the fortune his mother had promised him each night.
“The world is yours, my son,” she would softly coo and lull him to sleep.
Yet, a big break is not enough to purchase the world, a universe that is not for sale. He cannot pound a “sold!” sign into mother nature’s crust and reap it of its life, all for the sake of his economic dreams. The big names that flash across billboards too, do not own the world, for this world is no one’s after all.
It does not belong to the businessman, nor the artist that scampers across the warm pavement beaten by the sun. The idea of a masterpiece swirls in her mind, the paint scattered across her fingers and cheeks is proof of it enough. From the roof, I see her imagination, one where her name is side-by-side with renaissance artists, a name that is to be thoroughly taught in the classrooms of the future.
And despite her masterpiece, one that may bring fame to her name, it is not enough to have the world in the palm of her hand. A canvas cannot serve up to the price of the world, an amount sure to put the seemingly endless wealth into debt. If a brush bristled with straw was enough to conquer the world, it would have been robbed millenia ago, before we had learned to travel across vast skies or exist beneath the sea.
If this world is not the businessmans,’ not the artist’s, then it certainly does not belong to the historian, either. I watch as he places the lock between the two golden-arched doors, a gateway to what is left of the past. He is close to the truth---the closest of the three--to understand the world’s purpose, for which it does not exist to serve us. He has shelves of books and words stored behind his wrinkled forehead, recalling information as a lullaby once he takes refuge in his bed.
Even so, with all of the myths and morals that have been forged within his mind, he has far to go. He has miles to travel, bare without his knowledge, alongside the rest of history’s prided children to finally at last prove my truth. For as long as they witness and bear to the supposed victories of nations and empires, he will remain blind.
The truth has been set as this: the world belongs to no one but itself--the flowers, the trees, the springs, and the oases that create its nurturing core. I have learned from enduring the sky of Atlas, buried atop my shoulders. For our dilemmas, we do not have the world to blame, nor should we possess the pleasure of taking advantage of.
I shall bathe in the world’s waters, cleanse myself of the dirt and the mud of our sins, the ones that stain our souls. I will breathe my thanks into the wind and entrust it to carry along my words to the sun. I will not shrink the universe in my palm, for no warmth could ever be felt, dissipated within seconds of colliding with my roughened skin.
Instead, I shall bellow in my truth from the rooftops above. I will witness the triumphs of those who walk on the stone-cold road below, and watch as they trip meters from the world within their grasp. Madison Cossaboom is a writer and a dreamer. Her work is forthcoming or published in Teen Ink, Fleeting Daze Magazine, The Afterpast Review, and more.
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