PEOPLE WHO CHANGE OUR LIVES

Have you ever met a person who seems to radiate? Around whose bodice in the dark a halo like an angel's wing glows? Who seems to be a djinn in the forest of dilapidated trees and who is the gap in the tree leaves that brings forth moonlight?

Some people change our lives. ‘Change’ would be perhaps quite wrong as the fundamentality of one stays intact no matter how strong the blacksmith. They help us discover ourselves. They show us what we have lost in the dark muddy caravan trail everyone calls ‘life’. They are the ones who remain always to pick us up where all the wheels have trodden us down. Yet, they never lead us. They changed the matter of our mind and rot our crooked shields until we can lead ourselves. They are the voice of guidance that speaks within our minds at dark when to the world outside we are calm, yet inside we bleed from the wounds that destiny has rived upon our judgment. 

Such a person in my life is my grandfather. He is quite wizened. When he sits on his couch, I at his feet, a placement ages old, he looks at me with his dark black eyes which seemed to me like a stormy sea with the iris as the lighthouse.

When I grumble about injustice, he says that men are too weak to submit to things below them, to ‘feel’ suffering when it is just an emotion. We feel enlightened and we think it is just. Who draws up the walls between the just and the unjust? If it where true that such a wall does exist then wouldn't everyone, at some point, bang their heads against it wanting to cross over to the other side? When he says this, I feel that I am indeed not alone and last but that in this rift everyone stands. I am but one of them.

When I tell him that I do not wish him to ever die, he chuckles saying that he could not leave me before he troubles me a bit more with his sluggishness and oldness. I laugh back those dreadful tears that betray man like impish pixies and taunt us with images of the near future dark and too near to be false. He tells me that death is a word too dreary and morose, a flint that burns in scorched marks of dismay and hopelessness. He said that if he ever did die, he never truly will leave. His footsteps would still echo in the passages; his old dreary sandals would still be kept upon the doorstep as if he had just entered and memories of him would still be discussed by the ones who loved him. Would that mean he ‘left’?

All these truths of life, he tells me his words come out slowly and surely as if they were the truth of this world and the words etch into my mind. I wonder aloud that how could a man whose knowledge so vast and qualities so good be unknown to the outside world? My Grandfather tells me in that self-confident way of his that he changed my life. What more did he need?