relatively speaking

In the middle of the mountains where he lives, a boy finds a shell. He has never seen anything quite as beautiful. It’s shaped after the half-moon, he thinks. And it’s got the rainbow inside, a whole rainbow just for him. He clings on to it hard.
For years, he carries it with him, every day, around his neck, touching it ever so often just to check he hasn’t lost his lucky charm. He feels blessed by god or the gods, he’s not sure how, being only one god, he can handle being alone in heaven and not be sad. So he’d rather picture god surrounded by god friends, all working in a commune like the people from his village, sharing chores.
The boy grows as the mountainous jungle he calls home shrinks, burnt down, cut up, swallowed by the city people. They are so close he can smell them. He wonders how they look. Are they like the monkeys in the trees? Are they like the gods in the sky? Are they like him?
One day, the village becomes the outskirts of the city and now everyone has polyester as the cotton rots in the fields. Every one needs a job to buy things they can actually do but they don’t because some else has done for them. So the boy leaves his mountain with a tear in his eye, a pregnant wife in his hand and a magic shell around his neck. In the diesel train, they sit through the night in hard wood benches. They can hear the music from the restaurant car but they can’t afford to dance to it, like the bleached people with gold hair and sky eyes, from faraway lands. She sleeps with her head on his shoulder as he looks through the window in angst. It’s dark outside. As dark as his soul. He reaches once again for the shell around his neck. He rubs it, maybe hoping a genie will pop out though he’s never heard Aladin’s story.
It’s hard to say when he fell asleep or how long he slept. His wife is helping herself with a handful of rice from the plastic bag they brought. He takes some too. In silence. They can’t afford to talk either, words are too dear nowadays, even simple mountain-people know that. In silence, they watch the train enter a jungle of walls with electricity cables lianas, iron and smoke entangling them. The trains whistles. And chokes. And stops.
Two days and two nights has the boy, who’s not a boy anymore but a man, a full grown man with a family he can’t support because his mountain was claimed by the city people, two days and two nights has the man with a shell around his neck walked the streets of the greatest city of them all. Was there a jungle here before, he wonders. But he’s just a simple peasant with no education, he can’t afford to wonder, he hasn’t got the right words to structure this thoughts by for they are new thoughts, new feelings, new fears. The rice is almost finished. A little over 2 handfuls left, all for his wife for she is pregnant and walking for two must entitle her to eat for two, so there’s none for him. He needs a job. Desperately. He reaches again to his protecting shell and rubs it again with the unrealistic hope that makes men carry on when there’s just void ahead.
On the rise of the third day, exhausted, starving, the mountain man, holding his mountain wife’s hand, arrives at a beach. Except he can’t call it a beach because no one in his village has ever seen one, or the ocean, or sand, but we know it’s a beach and if we could speak his dialect we could tell him all about how his country has the most amazing beaches in the world. But he wouldn’t know what a country is either, so we’d have to go about explaining so many things it is better to leave it all alone and just stare at his gazing eyes.
His wife sits on the sand searching for lost rice in her empty bag. Women tend to be more pragmatic, especially when they’re pregnant, they can’t afford to be overwhelmed by the infinity of the ocean or the whiteness of the sand. The man with a magic shell, he keeps walking, like Johnny, even though he’s never tried whiskey before. The day will come when in sits with all the other middle aged workers from the factory, after work downing litre after litre of it, not Johnny’s but home made whiskey. For now, his feet sink into the sand and he pulls them out, one after the other as walking for the first time. He’s running already, his last reserves of energy, for there is more water that any man could drink but he’s so thirsty he sincerely believes he can drink it all in one going. He spits it immediately. It’s salty. It’s fucking salty, you sarcastic god, maybe he is alone in heaven after all and mocks us, his imaginary friends, am I your fucking joker god, is that why you created me and my wife, to have some fun?
Then, suddenly, looking back at the beach, he sees it: thousands of shells, millions, just like his, perfect little half-moons with rainbows inside, sitting there, flirting with the surf.
His is no way special. It’s just another shell. And he, he’s just another human being, another side damage everyone seems very comfortable ignoring.
And so, there is nothing else to cling on to.