The Boy Who Writes Alone

needs no introduction nor permission to be anything. He does not request to spread his arms wide and reach the heavens. His words are unmoored. They flow and change, remaking things before the world sees them. His hand— a gesture suspended by Gleti, between slumber and the thing he covets. His mother would make him go out in the sun with calluses and dirt under his nails, not the boy who writes with nothing but air— his imagination drifts smoke that creeps, that wafts through the darkness. She can see his future only in the toil of work where hands are hardened by sweat and men are measured in terms of muscle not the gauge of their thoughts. "I see no future in words," crusting like dry ground won't shatter what it holds. Notebooks in hand—if only she had an inkling where he wandered, what he wrote when the sky loomed patiently outside— "You must be lost, son." But he wasn't/isn't. Not now. The words are the map. The ink, a compass. The boy who writes is gone somewhere already. She once set his notebooks aflame— watching the flames tick the pages like Shachath, lived words lividly tossed in nuggets of oak. He sniffed at the fumes intentionally, did not succumb. Ashes did nothing— they fell prey to the burdens of his passion for release. Meanwhile, his mother invoked the farm as if it cut across her and the earth pulsed in her veins, calling for more than her hands could give. But none of it reached him. Not the scent of hay, the dust stirred by the tractor’s turn— weathered bones left behind in the shed. She can't see that it is not for him— not for the boy who bends to the soil, but for those who bend as if the land owns them, as if its thorns can hold them. But the boy with the pen is somewhere— the dirt cannot touch, somewhere— the ink flows faster than the creek he once skipped stones across. His feet are compulsory, made for roads not furrows; his heart beats in cities he has not yet seen— spaces full of words still seeking a place to be. His mind does not seek permission nor does it trace any earth. It flies, like birds unburdened by weight of earth— by laws of ground, by sweat his mother hopes will set him free. She can't conceive the scope of his mind— how it glides over her, over the trees, over the weathered barn, over the waiting fields; silent but for the earth's slow hunger. Her love has boundaries, his words have none. She used to question him, "What will you be?" He didn't reply. Didn't have to. He wrote. Words spinning into tales only he knew too intimately. He writes of those who are not able to write—the ones still waiting to breathe outside what they were born with. Of the world as it will be one day— the world everyone waits for. He writes because it is the only means he can be both earth and air, the man and the boy, the seed and the fire that will one day consume all. The boy writes alone, not because he is running but because he knows the world has yet to see him. And when it does— when it finally sees him, it will be in a language he has forged from coal and guts and tears and the inevitable space where thoughts are born before the world can name them. He writes because, in the end, his words will build the place he has never been allowed to walk in.