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frankebutler
I am a software developer by trade but love writing creatively before I ever wrote a single line of code.
2 Posts • 19 Followers • 0 Following
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Challenge
Challenge of the Month XI: December
The Unknown. Perhaps it's our purpose, or an obscure branch of theoretical physics. Maybe it's the existence of a supreme being, or the origin of life. Or maybe it's something more personal. Write about something unknown. Fiction or non-fiction, poetry or Prose. $100 purse to our favorite entry. Outstanding entries will be shared with our publishing partners.
frankebutler

The Unknown Wind

I thought I heard your voice

But it was just a whisper in the wind

As I lay alone

Listening to the night storm

I remember of days past

When this house was not empty

And life filled it to the brim

But now there is silence, no human soul

The only sounds are of nature

The thunder, the lightning, the rain

The trees being shaken by the storm

Nature’s way of letting us know that

Time is moving on

If there be a Person in this wind

If there is a Spirit in the rain

If there is a God sending sown the lighting and thunder

I wish that He would reach out his hand and sooth me

Perhaps the storm is the way the one above

Is letting me know I’m not alone

Yet still I yearn for company in my solitude and melancholy

Feeling detached with the world and close to nature

Leaving time behind and speaking to the eternal

Hearing your voice in the whispering wind

When you’re not here

Challenge
Write 500 words about death. Prose will select the top submissions and publish them in its first Kindle Anthology.
frankebutler

Death or Life Without Fear

Death is mine, my sweet temptress that comes to me when I'm alone and my soul is dark and heavy. My soul is a soul weighed down by the gravity of an invisible disease, drowning my spirits in despair and sorrow. Death is the way out, the escape from a meaningless, soulless, and dull existence. For others death comes as a monster threatening to take away from them what they value most. For me death is a Siren, a sweet song that tries to pull me into the abyss.

Death is an unknown. I have made death to be something it may not be. For an unknown is a blank canvas and the imagination of a human is a wild one. Do I go to heaven or hell? Do I pay the ferryman? Do I simply cease to be? I don't know and no one knows, a cold, hard fact that is unsettling to the human species, the animal most acutely aware of its own mortality.

As I have come to learn, it is not death I treasure, and not lack of existence that I hope for. My hope is for a different life, to be able to make the world brighter, fuller, and to help people see things and understand things that they may have never known of. It is not you Death that I want. Your song is old and jaded. Your appeal has been worn down by the wrinkles of time. It is Life I must seek, and I cannot wait for it; I must live it. For it is not so great to find myself, as it is to bring me to where I was meant to be.

Yet still every day is a struggle, as every day there seems to be silence. I walk and drive and work among many people. But even though I am among them I do not feel as if I am of them. It is as if Death wraps it's fingers around the neck of Life, not allowing it any air to breathe and make itself mean something. My heart is still beating in my chest but it seems as if life eludes me, as if I am separate from the world. I am body without a soul among a world that does not know me and I do not know it.

This is what throws me into the shadows of death and entices me to choke out life once and for all. But I can't do it. Is it courage? Is it cowardice? Is it knowledge that there still may be hope yet? Perhaps it would be better to make life mean something, and then I wouldn't be running away from life and trying to pull myself out of the clutches of death at the same time.

The calendar says that I am a young man, but I have grown old with struggle. It is a constant conflict, living in a paradox, and having two forces pull you apart at once. This constant struggle sucks the vitality out of youth and makes me feel tired beyond my age; it makes a young man feel old.

None can see what I hide so well, and what I hide so well I at the same time I yearn for someone to see. I've asked everyone from the good Lord to family to doctors for help, but I am still not happy. Perhaps it is me who needs to make the radical change, me who needs to fight back with hellish fury. What use is life if is merely a dead soul in the body with a beating heart? Perhaps the answer is not to survive, nor is it to give up, but perhaps the answer is to live a life without fear, and commit to death the thought of suicide.