Of Roots & Fractals

Throwing this out there and it was inspired by this writing prompt on Reddit.

Bob admittedly felt strange as he awoke on that Sunday morning, staring at the blue sky from his bed in his tiny one bedroom apartment, the bright sunlight forcing his eyes and his mind under the covers to try and regroup.

It felt like he got no rest at all, even though he had gotten into the habit of sleeping as much as possible, because it was better to be blissfully asleep rather than think about how lonely and isolated he was every single day of his life.

His eyes burned and his body ached as if he had been on a bender and then proceeded to start a fight in which the odds must have plainly been against him. Bob had vague recollections of a strange dream, of hands reaching out and a voice that kept telling him he had one last chance.

The Man With the Straw Heart

There once was a man with a straw heart who loved the people around him more then he could fathom and certainly more then he wanted to most of the time.

He saw their attachment to the material world, saw how they cared more for personal gain and trinkets then the people around them and although it filled him with fire, fire enough to burn his straw heart for only a moment at a time, and then he forgave them.

The man watched as love and friendship were tossed aside on arbitrary conditions of survival no longer needed, saw them cling to damp perverted animal skins like the caveman clung to the torch to scare away the night and sighed.

For him his love of the world was a mystery; to him the world was cold as ice, no one wanted to know him, no one could get close to the toxic strands that fell from his straw heart, weeping like a wound.

In reality this was only his love of all around him pushing the infection out, cleansing it and protecting the gift he had, which was the gift ever boy receives but a ‘man’ soon forgets.