What if -- rant: Question for a 2-year-old

What if you were sitting at the base of a mountain and it meant nothing to you. What if the beauty didn't. What if you just sat there, empty, and the mountain did, too, and there was no hum between the two, to , too.

What if you were sitting amongst it and it wasn't a Chinese landscape painting replete with geomantic implication? What if the wind were just cold, and the clouds were just wet, and you didn't even want to be out in it? What about that?

What if, when you walked around amongst the shrubs and grasses, they were just shrubs and grasses, and you couldn't hear their singing, or their heartbeat. What if they bothered you?

And the only thing that shook you was lightning, or death?

What then?

What if climbing endlessly on an escalator going down, in a mall, towards the phosphorescent lights, over babies and puppies and wives, and what if you never reached the white linen suit at the top? You were bloodied anyhow -- it would stain through.

What if all this struggling in the hooked nets pulling at your flesh, the thorns and places were just that? What if this was your gift, a plain of broken glass to distill happiness from; no shaman to save you in this land of grey suits and yellow ties. What if?

And you never deserved it, and even that didn't matter?

*****

What if that hole in your stomach, that kitchen-drain, black-hole thing that you fill with thick foods; what if they didn't work -- and it just kept sucking and howling and didn't let up? Would you pull your hair? Would you walk in the sunlight on sidewalks amongst the people? Would you?

What if, what if there are no answers -- never were, and this was all just made up? Like little kids in a sandpit in kindergarten digging to China for fun? A candy-cane -beamed structure to hold you above. What then?

What if this really was a place where a stranger could stab you in the back for no reason? Along an alleyway, after dancing, and drinking; and forgetting. What -- what if it was dark out, and the gruel dribbling down the middle of the alleyway didn't smell so good, and everyone else had walked ahead, and you were alone amongst the garbage bags, bleeding, and staring at the orange reflections of the streetlights dimpled in pools on the street.

This two-year-old in line in font of me in the grocery store just stared back -- the begged-for bag of candies in its brittle orange cellophane hanging from his forgotten fingers, eyes wide and staring.

He never did answer me.