Zeitgeist

So much was associated with colors, feelings, tastes, smells... or even well-being, which was encouraged by dark nights or bright sunny days. Green, lush grass that tickled bare feet and gave off a unique, unmistakable smell when it was mowed. Yellow, sparkling sand on beaches that connected to the open sea, smelling of freedom, salt, and more. A light or dark, swirling blue that radiated both wildness and calm. The orange of sunrise that helped you wake up gently. Glittering stars in the sky that made the darkness bearable and, when you looked closer, shimmered like rainbows in every color. The world wasn’t just black and white... it was incredibly diverse, but when you came from a world where colors, smells, and even feelings no longer had any value, you ended up feeling gray in all that diversity. An inconspicuous gray that you didn’t even notice on rainy, stormy days, a gray that blended into the world and seemed like nothing more than a shadow that appeared somewhere but left no lasting impression. Feelings were unpredictable, especially when they had to be suppressed for so long. Franklin struggled with all of this, even though he knew that feelings and emotions were what made the world so colorful, even if you weren’t able to see those colors. A warm touch didn’t just feel good, you could imagine it leaving a bright glow on bare skin, a subtle, unobtrusive ochre that eventually shimmered in the colors of fire when the touches became firmer and more intense. Franklin experienced everything very intensely, as if every feeling crashed over him with brutal force, lulling and enveloping him. He memorized every person he met..  he didn’t judge them, didn’t place them in boxes, but instead gave them a place in his mind that could never be erased, a place that offered them a home, even if they could never feel it or visit it.

But the overload also took root, dark thoughts, self-doubt, maybe even fear and confusion because while he could feel everything so intensely, he couldn’t feel himself. He saw himself in monochrome, losing more and more of the footing he thought he had found in this time zone. He wasn’t anchored yet, not calibrated… far from arriving, even though his gray slipped into the potpourri of colors and tried to mingle with them. A kiss triggered a whirlwind inside him, a gentle flutter in his stomach, goosebumps clinging to his spine. A touch made his body vibrate… crave more and take it all in, but in the end only the person stayed in his mind, not the feeling he had experienced with them. At first, he thought it was because you had to be in love to hold on to feelings, but then he realized something was wrong with him, that something was missing, or that something inside him blocked his ability to remember. He used his brain fully.. every damn niche, every capacity, both hemispheres and beyond. He could connect with the universe as if it were an extension of his mind. But none of it meant anything to him. All the knowledge he could gain wouldn’t stick, because he placed the social above the scientific. He placed people, nature, even animals on a pedestal that science could never reach, and he felt their suffering, their longing… their joy, as if it were all part of him, even though it wasn’t. Because he was a vessel that was empty, a vessel that only allowed the things his grandfather had programmed into him to rest inside. He fought it, resisted it… tried to open himself up even more… but he increasingly felt something inside him being irreversibly destroyed, and that it was intentional. Irreversibly…? Was that really the case? Nothing was impossible.. wasn’t that what people always said? You just couldn’t give up..  you had to keep fighting. But to fight, you needed a goal, didn’t you?

Franklin kept exploring the time zone, always smiling… maybe a bit more thoughtful now and not as naive as before, but he allowed neither grief nor trauma, even though it clouded his own colors and left only his blue eyes shining, curious and hungry to learn. His body was a shell, a genetic replica of his parents, his father’s sharp features, his mother’s eyes… the slim build shaped by his overly fast metabolism but at that moment it was nothing more than a body that could give a lot but could barely accept anything, a body not created to feel and truly experience. And he wanted to feel. He wanted to experience. He searched for it again and again, touched people, lived it out with them, fell into brief, dizzying ecstasy, only to wake up the next morning next to someone whose pain he could sense, how hard life was for them sometimes, but he still didn’t feel what it meant to be wanted. Sometimes his instincts weren’t wrong; some people stayed the night with him. Well… because they hadn’t found anything better. Some took advantage of him because he made it too easy… but the why and the how didn’t bother him. It was part of his self-discovery, and he didn’t even hold a grudge when, after passionate hours, he was simply thrown out onto the street, as if they were trying to make him feel used… oh… that left no trace on him.

Thoughts and experiences bundled inside him, wrapping around the knot, or rather the flaw, the missing component that prevented him from breaking free of his last chains. He was created to be better and more powerful than everyone else, smarter, stronger… but no matter how hard he tried to channel it all into his helper’s instinct, accompanying people, listening to them, being there without asking for anything in return.. the more overwhelmed he became, the more he longed for his own path ,the more he longed for destruction, for a solution that would rip all the suffering of others from his mind and free them from it. Eventually, a thought spun around in his head… maybe he wasn’t purely good. Maybe he was something neutral, something far more dangerous and unpredictable than taking his place in one of the other categories. But what would happen if he never found his colors… and his gray turned into a deep, dark void that swallowed and consumed everything…?