Fjäll (2)

The sky is a lonely place. I've started to spend my nights on the roof, staring up at the stars. Every night, they move another inch across the celestial plane, and it's harder to recognize them with every passing phase of the moon. There are patterns. There are patterns and there are movements. I've glared so intently, not blinking for minutes at a time, and everything else fades out of my periphery. Street lights disappear, and I can't hear the passing of cars. Just seeing the stars in their stellar cycles. It's been years since I returned to man's world.

I had wandered for a long time. I was trying to find myself by losing myself, as it were. I found things. Answers. But in my search for answers I only came back with more questions. Questions that only the soft, silent points of light can satisfy. I remembered being a young man.

I was waiting for Woden to bring me my death. One way or another, I was sick of this world, and would have Valhall or the cold embrace of nothingness. But it never came. I grew older and wearier, with every day that I waited for the hall to take me. Weeks went by, and months. Was I too impatient? Was I not brave or worthy? I had given all of my devotion and worship to the gods, for my whole life. I was subservient to the will of the AllFather, and all things that I was told were his wish. I had nothing more to give. Hopeless and resigned to an eternity of nothing, I began to crack.

"You old bastard! You half-blind snake!" I would scream into the rain. "Why am I not good enough?!"

Shaking from the cold, tears mixing with the drops hitting my face. A question falls from my lips and hits the ground with a sickening thud. "Are you even there?" The dull roar of the rain was my only answer. "No," I said to myself.

Months blended into years. I had nothing left to hold onto. No hope and no faith. My spiritual bond with the gods had been stripped away by disappointment. Were I younger and more hopeful I would find something else, some other spiritual input to fill the hole. But I found my only peace in leaving the world. I was lost for seemed centuries. Aeons I wandered that mountain. I knew I would die there. And die there I did. But, like all things, death is all a matter of perception, in the end.

Then, one day, as clear as a wildfire in the fog, I found myself beneath the trees. I found my best friend, my only friend, in one night. And all he had to do was tell me what I had already been thinking. That we are our dreams. That the gods aren't some inaccessible divine entity, hiding in the sky, watching our every move, judging. They are us, and we are them, of course! They are the reflection of our hopes and ideals shone onto the divine.

Now I stare up at those reflections. I stare up and I wait. Wait for what? I don't know, but I'm sure I will when it comes.