Ink Idle

Sakamoto sat on the park bench. His hands were nestled inside the pockets of his jacket. A pursuit of warmth trailed only by a pursuit of meaning in his senses, our protagonist had been sitting at the bench for an indefinite and unperceivable amount of time. It seemed to him as if he belonged in the park; the cold wooden bench by the shrubberies under the wanton sky. He stayed there as if fulfilling a promise to see the golden rays of the source of all life, which obscured by the February mist, never reached the surface of the Earth in its entirety. He had had several companions by the time he had remained in a seated repose, however none of them were as insignificant as fellow human beings. The first to appear by him was a goose, followed by a dog, and finally a cat, which even now lay curled next to him on the bench inside a small empty cardboard box. He let out his breath in a long draw. The vapor became one with the mist around him and the music of winter continued waltzing with the gentlest of breezes.

Life is a continuum of memories. To Sakamoto, his surroundings were ever changing. To an onlooker he may have been sitting perfectly still, almost prosaic in his disposition, and impassive on his brows, like the frozen lake in front of him, though the comparison couldn’t be more apt. Just because the surface of a lake is frozen, it does not indicate a recess in the passage of time and time does not flow without its passengers. Sakamoto’s life was different than any of us. We perceive our sense of time in the measure of our impact on the spaces around us: relationships, consumption, production, or presence. However, even if none of these take cognizance of our corporeal frailties, time acknowledges us. It is only a matter of verbiage. Some time back, various people around Sakamoto had called him worthless, his ex-wife even going forward to say that he was a waste of space on this Earth. To the onlooker, it may have been hard to argue a case for him, but the cold hard fact of the matter was that Sakamoto’s life was innocently extraordinary.

It wasn’t until the freedom of the millennium, as he liked to call it, that he discovered the futility of trying to live a life that wasn’t his own. The body may adjust to the air around it, but the mind is not so easy to fool and it is impossible to trick the soul into submission. Sakamoto realized this when one night as he slept next to his wife after a session of uninterested love-making, he dreamed his first dream in over ten years. He found it exceedingly surprising that he hadn’t felt the vacuous abyss of a life without dreams. I am lying to myself, he said to himself in the morning and gazed about the room. Even if it was only partially, his wife seemed content at living their life as the consolation of a mutual compromise of the soul was the knot that kept the marriage alive. But Sakamoto could feel the knot beginning to come undone. Twenty years in a story that he would not have written himself. His fists curled up into balls within his jacket, but his face remained still and his eyes poring into the video tape of the memories of his life.

Reflection is a voluntary action. It is like rummaging through old VCRs in the cabinet and selecting one that is gnawing at the heart the most, poring a warm drink and sitting in front the television in a night gown and watching every moment on repeat. Some times the tapes are faulty, the memories a bit fuzzy but the words, they echo. Sakamoto stared into the blank screen of his divorce, his mind a haze back then and even now. All that remained were the insinuations of being a deluded man. A man so steeped in the mock realization of the existential ego that he had lost touch with all reality, accusations flowed from all fronts: his ex-wife, his sister, his friends, and the ones that dug deepest, his father. A man should live for the world, he would say. He should be the flag-bearer for winning within the constraints of life’s compulsory compromises. However, they all forgot one thing, Sakamoto’s life was unlike any other.

“So what is your life supposed to be?” asked the cat, licking its paw.

After a few years of obscurity, during which our protagonist did exactly what he was meant to do, simply exist with no sense of roots or purpose, Sakamoto made a breakthrough in the conventional sense of life. Within the same month, he released a book and a music album. He had travelled all over Japan in the past few years. His objective was merely to observe all kinds of life and ways of living. If there was one quality his marriage had taught him, it was to follow diction and let the self flow through it. Through his travels, he could exercise his will to sever any of his many lives the moment he wished to. If he felt he had seen enough to satiate his curiosity for sensations of culture and being, the next morning he would be in a train to another place. He never planned his destinations. He would simply sit on a train, take a snooze, and get off at the next station where he woke up. Sakamoto’s life was an absolute submission to the thrills of time. Most of us live afraid of time passing us, cheating us, favouring us, or abandoning us. Sakamoto simply gave up his time in the very hands of time. In all his travels, he had only consumed one diary, in which he wrote the location of his self, his meals, and his dreams.

By the end of his travels, he had ended up in a small temple in the hills of Kyoto. He spent the longest time there, about six years. He lived with the monks and at night he would write. It just so happened that a passing traveller over a period of two months recorded Sakamoto’s indulgent humming at night and proposed to him an idea for releasing an album. As was his life, he flowed through the gates of opportunity and came to a point where he was asked to speak to an impressed crowd at a bookstore.

So, Sakamoto spoke. While he spoke, every member of the audience surrendered the same way he had to time. A room where tales spoke of their own accord, an entire realm of experience revealed. It was no wonder that the atypical life of a fifty year-old man was the sensation for a temporary spasm in the eons of life but it was one unlike any other. Sakamoto, for the first time, smiled. The memory faded away as he looked at the cat.

“My life is supposed to be an obelisk to free will and free being.”

He said and got up as a single ray of sunlight hit his shoulder and then was obscured again. It was time to move on once more.