Fic: Allegory of the Cave [589 words]
Prompts: Plato's Allegory of the Cave andthese lyrics by the All American Rejects:
You're sweet just like the sun, but what happens when the sun doesn't stay? Night reminds me when you went away.
When Serena leaves, it's like she takes the light with her. He knows that that sounds like a fucking cliché, but hey, his whole life is a fucking cliché at this point so it kind of fits.
It's not like he's stuck in endless night now, he can still see. It's more like all the colors are gone. She left him, and now he's stuck with grey and black.
It feels like he's living in one of those movies Blair adores so much. And just like in those movies, nothing makes sense. Blair says they do, just pay attention Nate they have meaning, but to him it doesn't and they don't. Maybe that means that he has never paid enough attention, at this point he doesn't care.
During their junior year, in their philosophy class, they once talked about this guy, Platon, or was it Plato? Nate isn't sure; he was never that good at philosophy.
Their teacher, had looked so old that Nate had suspected that he had actually met the ancient Greek philosophers himself, no kidding.
And he had always wanted them to think and discuss the what if's and had encouraged them to look for the truth, and Nate had never been that good at finding truths.
Still wasn't.
Anyway, this Plato wrote a thing called the Allegory of the Cave.
It is about some people who are locked in a cave since the day they've been born. They are chained to the ground; they just sit there in the dark. The only thing they've ever seen are the shadows that are playing on the cave wall they're facing. So, because they've never seen anything else, they think that those shadows are real. And when one of them is freed, and able to leaves the cave, he sees the real world.
At first the light and the beauty of it all hurts his eyes, but after a while he's able to really see. And he realizes what lie him and the others have been living.
Then, with all this new knowledge he has to returns to the cave. But because his eyes are now used to the sun, he's lost his ability to see in the dark. And he has realized that the shadows are nothing but that, shadows, illusions of things that may exist somewhere, and they have lost all meaning to him.
When he tries to tell the others, that they aren't really living, that their whole world is just an illusion they don't believe him, at first they laugh at him and then they get angry, but because he doesn't stop, tries to convince them again and again, they kill him.
Nate remembers that, back then, when he had been sitting in class next to a sleeping Chuck, and had been thinking about Blair and Serena he had thought that maybe it had been worth it for the guy. Because at least he had seen the light and known the truth, instead of living his life surrounded by shadows and illusions, because to Nate, living your whole live in an illusion had sounded far worse.
Now it's different, what's wrong with living an illusion? (As long as you don't know what the real thing could be like.) So fuck the light and the truth, because even if you have seen them you still have to go back to your cave.
And if you had never seen that stupid light in the first place, then maybe living in the dark wouldn't hurt so much.