Radiant Daggersby Iliad Terra

I was having a cup of coffee with a friend, and on a whim craved a cigarette.

Sitting at the table to our right was a disheveled man in his mid sixties, having a smoke.   I asked to bum one.

Graciously and quite generously he reached for his pack and pulled one out, offered it to me, followed by a lit match.   “You’re trying to quit aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, not having expected the question, “I had just bought a pack yesterday, smoked one, and threw away the rest of the pack disgustedly.”

“We’re all that way,” he replied.   “We are destructive and find our freedom by destroying ourselves.   Smoking is destructive, illogical, but so was the aboriginal act of scarring our flesh to seek salvation.”

“You’re right, we do that in all aspects of our lives, technologically, politically, it’s all insane, a perverse catharsis.”

“I only value the young,” he interrupted me, deep in his own private reminisce and nostalgia.   “Only the young have hope and optimism for constructing the world, building it, saving it!”

I had read this long ago, and believed it more and more as the years wore on, so I told him “someone had once said that life is wasted on youth.”

He paused, a flash of recognition darting across his eyes.   He repeated what I had just told him, “!life is wasted on youth,” and again slightly louder, “life is waste on youth!”   I was surprised by the dramatic effect my casual comment had on him.

“You’re right, I never though of it that way,” he said.

He had become animated, hinting a smile across his face.   Perhaps I had penetrated somewhere hidden, a secret place.   I will never know.

My friend had gotten up and was ready to leave, so I bid the stranger goodbye and took my leave of him, never asking for his name.   As I left him to his thoughts subsequent to our paths having so briefly crossed, I couldn’t help but imagine if I had given him a gift, some sort of a radiant dagger perchance!

-Iliad A. Terra