Disclaimer: Not mine
Lessons Unto Immortality
The meaning of his life is defined in patterns of black and white which he cannot read. He has never learned to read them, only to create them, to place them on crosshairs at the direction of a ghostly fan, a phantasmic rustle of a sleeve. He does not understand when his opponents' eyes go suddenly wide and then blank and then close in awe and defeat. I resign, they will say, and he will always bite his tongue to keep it from asking, Why?
They call him a genius. He calls it a mystery.
This is a world he does not understand, the world of black and white, planed out into rows and columns on a nineteen by nineteen wooden board. He sees pictures, sometimes, in the stones, nonsensical things: animals, faces, as one would see in clouds. He does not see a furious battle for conquest, cunning stratagems for victory, desperate sacrifices before defeat.
His companion is not of his world, he thinks. This is most obvious; he is not dead. But, he thinks, perhaps his companion was never from his world at all. Perhaps he is of the other one, the one in which he spends his days of incomprehension. Perhaps in that structured world of rules and lines and hidden value: one never dies, only so loses themselves in the game, the life, that they break away and pass through to his.
This is what he thinks when he broaches the subject upon his constant yet flickering companion. He is eight years old. Perhaps it is not too late for him to pass from his world into this other. Perhaps he too, does not need to die. The white face and ghostly lips smile at his request. A fine fingered hand reaches from beyond ancient sleeves and moves slyly against his palm. Would you have that? he is asked. He swallows his fright, for the ghost has never touched him before, nor has its wavering outline ever hardened so, sharpened into reality.
I would, he replies. I would very much.
His ghost nods and settles in front of the board. He cannot read the expression in its eyes. Take a handful of stones, he is told. This is called nigiri...