The Greatest Joker

The moon was sleeping up ahead, the forest lit by her glow. The lush forest was asleep. It was as if Hypno had spread his magic around the world, and Morpheus had come to give them dreams. It heaved a collective breath, harmonized, as all things in nature must be to survive. In, out. In, out. It smelt of pre-dew, dawn was coming, and so many other things. The forest may have been silent, but the smells were having a concert. Beginnings of moisture, heady carbon dioxide. Fecal matter dancing with the sweat of the furry creatures in the moonlight. The sensation of being there, of being alive, taking it all in can best be described by the rush you get from inhaling pure petroleum. If you looked closely enough, you could almost see the trees breathing in, out, leaves were swaying gentling, hanging upside down, grass heaving and sighing. It was not windy on this summer night. The grass felt soft, and yet the blades were sharp enough to cut. The forest tasted of sunlight green and earthy brown. In a glade in the forest, deep inside, moonlight struck chord, a symphony of silence and smells and soundlessness. In the glade, a bee buzzed around a rock. The bee was out to get the proverbial worm, and yet it was too early. It buzzed around a rock, waiting for the flowers to wake up. The rock stirred, slightly. Unaware, it was too early for high level reasoning, the bee continued buzzing around the rock as the moonlight playing her sole sonata over the two. A scaly inside snapped out of the rock, a speed that belied the reptile’s general movement speed. With one sound, jaws closed locked, poof. That’s it, the bee’s life was over. It made no difference. The forest breathed on. In a few minutes, the sun would shine bright, birds would start chirping, out for worm. The sunlight would breathe life into the forest, animate it with sounds, the beating hearts of thousands. None any the wiser that one of those tiny hearts had stopped overnight. Had been stopped. This was not a tragedy but a cosmic, comic joke. Meaningless lives. Live drawn to each other by the magnetism of living, breathing, beating hearts. Snap, in the blank of an eye gone. A hundred seconds or a hundred years. Time is an illusion, the biggest joke of all. A flashlight not illuminating the dark but enhancing it. We are all aliens to one another, aliens to different species, aliens to different races, aliens to our communities, aliens within our homes and to our families, and worst of all aliens to ourselves. We ask questions that have no purpose, seek knowledge that is useless and in the end, nothing remains but emptiness, a gasping chasm, a dark void, fiery, hungering pits of Tartarus that nothing can satiate. Nothing remains but emptyness and more questions to be answered, more questions that are worthless. Life is not a tragedy, life is a cosmic joke.