Take life by the throat

As I lay there, my legs being crushed by the huge trunk, and hearing my steed run off in the distance, I knew I was going to die. And for the second time in my life, I didn’t know whether I cared or not. The pain became too much and darkness came upon me.

For the first two days I just waited there, feeling how I gave up more and more of my resistance. I fell in and out of a restless sleep, dreams of the past haunting me along with the pain from awakening and feeling my crushed bones. I had expected to die from inner bleedings long before the third day came.

But as dawn came on the third day and I admitted to having stayed alive and awake to see yet another day, other thoughts entered my head. I remembered the people who had admired my way of life; how I threw myself at every challenge and how I seemed to enjoy every day with the double vigour of that of my younger friends. I used to tell them that I aimed to live hard and die young. Well, just look at me now. I’m basically just getting what was coming to me. I would have turned six and twenty this year. If my aim was to die young, then why wouldn’t today be a good day to die?

Lying there, I started chuckling to myself. It was a bitter laughter, mocking my whole existence. Somewhere in the distance, magpies took off, cawing away as the lifted. I laughed at how I had thought that life wouldn’t be enjoyed unless I burned all the way through it. I had encouraged my comrades to live like me, to take life by the throat, kiss it hard and then throw it away. I had expected them all to envy me for my insane ways of life. It all felt ridiculous and pointless, as I thought about it.

Then it hit me. There was actually someone I had always envied. The one person who seemed to enjoy life more than I did; Brother Borrel. “Brother Barrel”, we had called him, laughing at his slow ways and his impressive belly. But Brother Borrel had always laughed with us, never taking offence or falling for “base temptations” like anger. Instead he had gone up to his tower and taken another slice of cheese, enjoying the grey weather outside.

He was the calmest person I had ever known. Rather than take life by the throat, he would stroke it calmly and sit down next to it, enjoying every aspect of it, be it past, present or future. Where I would hold a grudge against myself for making mistakes and constantly trying to rectify them, he would just smile at them and try to do better next time. It seemed that life had many things to teach me still. Things I probably wouldn’t have been able to take in, had I not been lying there, under that cursed log.

“Cursed?” I thought to myself, “This log is the most blessed one I’ve ever had the pleasure to be crushed under”.

Once again, I started laughing, but without the bitterness I had felt before. Instead, I felt renewed, lying there in my seemingly unprovoked mirth. I drew in a large breath of the dank, musty morning air, then clenched my fist, filled with new purpose, yet with a calm I hadn’t felt before in my life. I felt my hand burning, and almost thought I heard a crackle from the smoldering determination of my blood. Then I threw myself at the log with all my power and new strength of will. There was a loud crack as the wood gave in, in a blinding flash of light and flame. My whole body was filled with new strength as I got to my shaking feet. Seemed like they weren’t broken, after all. I was free. Free from my own shackles.