Exodus

Methuselah

            You’ve lived far too long. Day after day, week after week, until the months melted into years and the years became drops of water slowly filling the basin of your lifetime. It feels like you’ve lived forever, perfectly preserved in the bog of time. Or maybe you’re already dead, and you only move because of the ebbings of life’s rivers, which won’t even stop for death. It doesn’t matter either way. No matter what you’re adrift in the ocean, slowly allowing the water to take you under.

            Life drags on slowly when you have nothing left. All you’ve had for an uncountable amount of years are dull, grey walls festooned with cracks and a small window that light barely comes through. It’s only a sliver of light, but it makes everything worthwhile. To wake up and see a small beam peaking through the bars, even though it brings no warmth to your cold cell. That is what you want to see every morning, but every day passes by so haltingly. If life is a river, it’s a river of molasses.

            Someone knocks on the door. It’s one of the guards, you already know that. Nobody else would ever come for you. Everyone you know is already dead and gone, likely rotted away by now, swept away by the power of the tides, their bodies battered on wet rocks.

            The guard doesn’t wait for you to say anything. The guards never speak to you, they only rely on an established series of events that prisoners and guards alike need to follow. The guard pushes the door open and there he stands, a towering monument to strength. Before him you slump small and powerless, a relic of the conquered. Without caring for your input, he leads you outside the cell and into the sun, towards your short excursion from the riverbed.

Enoch

            Methuselah enters the yard, his body staggering across the floor under the weight of his years. Upon seeing his face you realize that you haven’t lived long enough, you haven’t done much of anything that compares to him. You’ve wasted years of your life hating this prison, hating its bond on you, while Methuselah accepted his fate and took solace in the protection it gives from the outside world. He’s a wise sage, while you’re nothing but a toddler.

            “Come to try and exercise a bit?” you yell to him, already anticipating his answer. He’s so old that there’s no chance of convincing him to do anything more than walk. If he did, his body would crumble like an old relic, and you’d be left to do the cleaning up.

            “I’ll just watch the birds,” he mumbles back in a barely audible voice, moving towards his usual spot under the basketball hoop. Whenever he comes out he sits there, watching anything and everything that breathes, never taking his eye off the world for even a second. “When you get to be my age,” he explains sometimes, “you notice that nothing stops for you. You just need to sit back and watch everything, go along with it all. Otherwise you’ll be left in the dust and won’t know how everything changed.”

            You decide to sit next to him. You’re far younger than Methuselah, so you might as well listen to his ramblings every once in awhile. He never ceases to amaze you with his endless contemplation. There’s not a single thing he doesn’t have complicated thoughts for, nothing that he won’t analyze in depth. While you take most things at face value, he doesn’t trust outside appearances.

            “Look at those birds,” Methuselah says. “I’ve always had a fondness for blue jays, but these are much more majestic.”

            “They’re pigeons,” you say. “Pigeons are awful.”

            “On the contrary,” he states. “They’re the epitome of birds. They’ve managed to spread out everywhere, thriving no matter what the challenge. Nobody could have expected them to exist for so long, and certainly their expansion was unforeseen. In a sense, you could say they’re like me. Resilient. Old. Fragile, yet continuing on for some reason. They just won’t embrace their own destruction, despite it being their destiny. They will all die off someday, but they take no notice of it. It’s wonderful, really. Birds bred to the point of absurdity, filling every corner of this world, and yet their vitality is more pleasing than the beauty of any other bird. They’re content with what they have, even though the world batters away at them.”

            He lies down and rests his head on his arms, taking no further notice of you. “For the rest of my time here,” he yawns, “I think I’ll just watch.”

            Out of respect for him, you get up and move to your own corner. Methuselah needs his time to rest, and whenever he does this, you take the time to pray. Not a day has gone by that Methuselah has ignored his napping, and thus you haven’t ever failed to pray. You can’t really explain why you feel such a connection between Methuselah and prayer. Do you want God to make you live as long as Methuselah, or do you fear that age will curse you? Do you want to have the seemingly God-given wisdom of Methuselah? Or do you want to be delivered alongside Methuselah from the prison so that you can live with him, protecting him until the end of his days? You don’t know. You hardly know anything. You just pray.

Samson

            You’ve kept an eye on these two for countless years, and finally it’ll end today. All this time of watching over them, escorting them from cell to yard, yard to cell, back and forth time and time again. Always using your strength to keep them in their rightful place, always listening to Methuselah’s ramblings, always watching Enoch pray in the hope that maybe, just maybe, one of them will do something. Maybe they’ll give you cause to rough them up a bit. Maybe they’ll stand up one day as new men, men that won’t be weighted down by your overbearing presence. Maybe they’ll actually take notice of you someday.

            It’s odd how they never seem to care about you. You’re just “one of the guards.” They’ve never called you by your name, even though you’re the only guard assigned to them. Nobody else is able to put up with them, nobody else can withstand their tunnel vision. It’s as if Enoch only hears the words of Methuselah and only sees the face of God, while Methuselah only sees the world. So long as you’ve been around them, you’ve never seen them acknowledge anything other than what they want to, nothing more than what they yearn and live for. There’s no room for you in their lives. You’re nothing to them.

            That ends today. Today is the day that you’ll finally drag them from the ashes, the day that you’ll scrape the bottom of the barrel and pull them out. There’s a new world for them just over the walls, and you’ll get them there if it’s the last thing you do. The planning has taken years out of your life, but they’re worth it. You can’t really explain it, but there’s something about Methuselah and Enoch. You can’t help but feel that they aren’t concerned with you at all, but there’s something more there. It’s like you’ve known them your entire life.

            It’s like they’re family.

Methuselah

            At this moment, everything stops. The birds are flying in slow motion, the wind no longer blows, and there’s complete silence. It’s something you’ve never experienced, despite the length of your life. All these years, and the world is still surprising you. You could live like this forever, just lying down in this prison yard while Enoch prays. This is your Promised Land, your perfect world where everything happens just as it should. The world moves at a reasonably slow pace. There is no pain, only the sunlight and normality exist. Some see prison as a hell on earth, but you find a strange calmness in it.

            That’s when you notice him standing across the yard, the sun just behind his back. You forgot that he was there somehow, forgot that he’s always there. In the brief moment that everything seemed to go at the perfect pace, you forgot that he was what allowed this. Without that guard, you would never be able to see such sights, such complexity in the world. You’ll be sure to thank him when you next get the chance, but you won’t thank him right now. If you were to move, you’d lose grasp of all this glory around you.

Enoch

            The guard taps you on the shoulder and you get up. Over the years it became a ritual, his silent acknowledgement of your habits, and his endless respect for them. He won’t say anything to you directly, but what happens in the world is what lets you know that he’s there. Like right now, this tranquility and his soft touch, letting you know it’s time to go back into your cell. He’s like a father figure to you, letting you know when it’s bedtime. But it’s not a warm bed you’re going to where he’ll tuck you in. You’re going back to your cold cell, where a look of endless pain will go over his face as he locks the door, unable to do anything more for you.

            You get up and start the walk towards the cell. This is also a part of everyday life. He doesn’t lead you, but instead he follows what you do. You choose for yourself, and he’ll support whatever decision you make, so long as it falls within certain boundaries. Follow the commandments and everything will be fine.

Samson

            You return to Enoch’s cell later that night, far later than you’re supposed to. You look down at him, asleep on his hard mattress. You don’t want to part with him, but you know it’s time. There’s nothing you can do to stay together with him. You need to let him walk completely freely, without your guiding hand. You’ve already established a doctrine of free will; now you need to truly allow it.

            You slide the cell door open quietly, not out of fear of waking Enoch, but from fear of others hearing you. You have to maintain your role, make your intervention as inconspicuous as possible. So long as they keep trusting you, you’ll be able to intervene in their world.

Enoch

            A sound from the door stirs you. In the darkness you can’t make out exactly what it is, but you can tell it’s a person. You turn towards him and stare directly at his face, but you’re unable to see past the veil of night. Fear starts to well up in your stomach, your body’s reaction towards this unforeseen event. Someone is opening your cell late at night, the time when the guards are all sleeping or drinking away. Fear, fear, fear. Nothing but fear.

            The figure extends a hand towards you, beckoning for you to take it. Should you take it, or should you shrink away? Do you accept this intervention in your life, or do you rely only on yourself? Your fingers tremble as you grab the hand. When in a hellish world of perpetual darkness, there’s no point in denying the little help you can get.

            The person pulls you out of the cell and starts to push you through the halls. You can’t tell where you’re headed; you’ve never been this way before. Regardless, the figure pushes you onwards, further into unmapped territory. Not a single word passes between the two of you during the ordeal. There’s only silence until suddenly you’re outside, the cold night air hitting your face and the new moon shining down on you and your guide.

            You turn around to look at the person that had guided you out of the world of the dying, baffled at how you had gotten out. In a mere matter of minutes, you had undergone a journey like the Israelites, without any problems arising along the way. A higher power had guided you from the bonds of your cell and into a new world.

Standing before you is your escort guard, the man you’ve never exchanged a single word with. “Why?” you ask him, your mind unable to process what’s happening. Then you realize that there’s another very pressing question, one that can only give an answer that you’ll never understand. “How?”

            The guard looks at you for a little while, his face almost glowing in the moonlight. He bends down a little so that the two of you are at the same eye level. As if a command, he simply says, “Have faith,” and he turns around to walk back inside, leaving you outside with a whole world laid out before you, your very own Promised Land.

Methuselah

            He came in the nighttime and carried you on his back, making sure that you didn’t feel the slightest jostle during the journey outside. Then you were there, standing next to Enoch, having left your Promised Land and entered back into the world of sin. “Why?” you ask the guard, completely uninterested in the “How.” It had simply happened, but for everything there must be a cause that will impact the effect.

Samson

            Why? Why did you help two men that never spoke to you before, two men that you were meant to keep confined, two men that felt they were doomed to remain in prison? Is there really a need to have a reason, or is it just something that needed to be done?

            You don’t know for certain. You don’t know much of anything for certain. You just decided to help them, for better or for worse. All you did was help your family, and there’s no need to have a reason for that.

            Something like that, you just do.