To the next cycle

His entire life was dedicated to the future, to the total annihilation of the past and those of us in it. It’s that way with any visionary; a tale as old as time, as they say. And with the stakes as high as he was led to believe, who could blame him? I don’t blame him. But I question what future these visionaries could secure if what comes next—the shuffling survivors following, the true future—is laced with the chaos and destruction they leave in their path. Is it not a dystopian of a kind? Is it not a page of one book exchanged for another? Genre the same. We survive in his wake. Maybe it is that his destructive chore always must be localized. Utilitarian in its way. Yes, you will suffer, but many will not now that you are destroyed. He was certainly aware of it.

“You’ll have wished to be dragged through the streets of Laramie instead of what we will ask of you.” But he was no Jesus. Or more likely, Jesus was a lot more like him. Both yearning to assist and see their reflection next to those other heroes, and wanting a little grace, a little more in the account.

When he asked. They left. Or their voice did. The direct line severed upon a plea, “Just a little bit.” No. And when They left, he was cast adrift. There were no more reasons, no more grand plans for him. He had to make his way without Their guiding voice. He did not make his way. How could he? How can someone look at this world without the voice from above and say, “Yes, this way.” They can’t; he couldn’t. Instead he floated along the gutters with the regularity of season. And us, the next cycle, were nowhere to be found.

He saw us, regularly. But we were not located. He spoke to us, regularly. But we had no voice to call back. The next cycle inevitably must recreate the wheel. Others, outside Their purview, carry a cycle and rotation that can stretch back to Sumerian times, I am sure, and their rotations enhanced by the sacrifice, but the wheel of the visionary is necessarily destroyed, unable to carry their next cycle anywhere. So we must invent a new one. But it is the plans and designs and details that made the cycle in the first place is lost. Our wheel’s come out warped. The spokes odd. The degrees immeasurable without radius. All that come after him, after me, affected by the wake of our visionary. We don’t drag the dead with us as further definition and direction, as others do. For there can be no past that of his brilliant implosion. There is only us, indistinct, blinded, without future, not trying to bridge the gap but trying to understand the gap’s implication. The absence.

Even had he wished to transfer the soil of future to us, his focus somehow superhuman, with one eye on time’s catastrophe and on my spelling test, his destruction would have burnt whatever had begun to grow, any nutrients scorched by the requirements of prophecy. His soil is necessarily inert. The revolution of the cycle always requires its destruction when complete. So others can feel his absence as an indication of a future path, without his shadow. And us searching his remains for their use and angle, arguing about their size and effect.

His failure was not his gaze set to the horizon. It was not that he could not see me or his other children. And it was not that he chose to jump and burn in Their brilliant, consequential hearth. It is that all of it was necessary. He had no choice, and our “choice” is a necessary effect of some cause no one but Them could indicate. But They do not speak to me. There are no answers in Their silence. None that I can find.