A Stroll Through Town

If my life were to be interred in an unmarked grave, then what point was there to live?

In a world of sorrows, there is always punishment. If I were paraded around naked for the whole world to see, hearing the jeers and contempt from some bystanders, and the pity and sorrows in others' voices, whose should I choose to remember? Whose will I truly remember? Will I remember anything at all?

I stand outside, tied to a wooden pole, shivering in the cold, hoping to withstand the night and begin walking at dawn. Should I be unable to parade myself back to that clock tower in the square, withstand the cacophony of the crowd along the way, or otherwise fall over or stop walking, I am to repeat the punishment. But maybe I can withstand, just this once, and fly free like the birds that used to perch on the streets, before the crowd scared them all away to other parts of our world.

I wish to be a bird, but it isn't so easy. If I fall, there is only the rest of the day for rest till I must repeat the punishment, and after thirty days of tries, my life is forfeited to be a common slave, toiling for eternity.

So I hope to be a bird on the first day, but the dread in my heart and the fear in my body overwhelms me. And I am so nauseous from worry by the end of the first night that when they untie me, I take twenty steps, stumble, fall, and vomit.

The laughing immediately begins. They seize me by the armpits and drag me to the jail to languish in a cell with stale bread and cold soup until I am tied to the pole again in the evening.

Almost everyone is punished like this, of course. We don't call it punishment, but a noble initiation into society. Some people are set free on this first night, and some achieve it with whatever boost of adrenaline they have left by the very last night. Some make it to the crowd and collapse, but not before flaunting their voluptuous masculine and muscular feminine bodies. Those ones are set free through marriage before the week ends, despite their failure.

But me? It is almost the dawn of the thirtieth day, and my hands are trembling, my eyes hot, my head pounding, my vision blurry, and I am retching, tied to the pole, hoping something comes out, but all the bile in my stomach is gone at this point. I reek of thirty days of sweat, urine, and stomach acid. The cold winds pummel my face, and I tremble in hopeless anticipation of my life, obsequious to someone I don't know and will never know. I look down at my wretched twigs of legs in ignominy of my lack of virility. They untie me. I stand, dizzy, take two steps, and fall.

Thus is my life, already entombed at the age of twenty.