It has been a while since I dared to make a wish.

It has been a while since I dared to make a wish.
For I know the bitter truth.
Of this world I never made.

It targets dreams and wishes.
Strangles them.
Beats them.
Carves them into parts.
Before your very eyes.
Because you dare to dream
Of a better world.
Of a kinder life.

Sometimes, I know, it’s better,
And so much easier.
To be silent.
To not make any wishes.
To not have any dreams.
To keep them buried.
To keep them safe.
From this world I never made.

But today…

Today I heard that small, quiet voice.
The one that lives inside my soul.
The one that whispers quietly.
The one that never lies to me.
The one that knows the truth.

That voice…

The voice of my heart…

And I know.
I know.

There is a wish I have to make.
Before I can ever sleep at night.
In this world I never made.

Come at me once again, you demons.
You shadows in the dark.
Strike from the corners,
Where the light doesn’t shine.
Where you hide.
And wait.
Until I speak the truth.

I know then you always strike.
But you can never win.
Never silence.
That small voice.
That quiet voice.
That never lies.
That speaks the truth.

Today I make a wish.
For friends.
For friends I do not know.
Friends I will never meet.
Whose hands I will never get to hold.
Whose hugs I will never know.

Today I make this wish.
For them.
And for me.
May it shine a bit of light
Where it needs to go.
Into the dark corners,
And the darker hallways.
Of this world I never made.

I saw the words of a wounded soul today.
Cold,
Black,
Impersonal words.
Black, digital patterns.
On a field of white.
It was a cry for help.
So very obvious to me.
Like I could hear the words.
Cried out by a heart.
Left too alone, for too long,
In this world of dark, and cold.

And I found I wished an old wish once again.
But in a different way.

I have always wondered if perhaps,
I should get a chair.
A wheelchair.
Not a fancy one.
A simple one.
That I’d have to push around myself.

I have always wondered if perhaps,
I should find such souls.
Trapped.
Wounded.
In the dark.
And in the cold.
And grant them simple wishes.
Wishes I know they don’t receive.
Make dreams come true for them.
In a world that’s stolen everything.

Perhaps someday I should.
Get that chair.
And take my car.
And drive.
Drive to where those wounded are.
And ask them,
Please,
If they would care
To take a walk with me.
Through the flowers of a garden somewhere.
Along the boardwalk of a beach.
In a bookstore filled with books.

Or if they have somewhere,
Someplace they dream of going.
That the never go.
That the never see.

And give the gift to me.
Of giving that to them.

It would mean
They wouldn’t be invisible.
They wouldn’t have to live alone.

So, there’s my wish,
World that I never made.
I may never see the day
When I strive to make that wish come true.
There are too many parts of me,
Too many parts of my soul.
That are long gone.

But I know.
Even writing down the words.
Making my wish known.
In this world I never made.

Is a dangerous thing to do.

And perhaps.
Perhaps.
My heart is only trying to tell me
What I know I should really do.

I do not know.
I only know.
What I wish for on this day.
In this world.
I never made.

Come at me world.
I know you will.
I know you have to kill.
This simple wish I’ve made.

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Miranda Kate’s Mid-Week Challenge : 2018/06/13

At work, everyone thinks I’m great. I’m the talented one. The one that fixes all the problems. It’s what Tommy said when they brought in the new system. “I could play around with it for 3 days, and get nowhere, and have no idea what was wrong, or how to get it to work. Or, I can short-circuit the whole process, be smart, and call Freddy for help right now.”

Yep. That sums up work. If it’s a mystery, call Freddy. Call me. And I’ll come figure it out. In a matter of minutes. The guy from the research lab said that too, just in a different way, “How did you find that problem in half an hour while we were a lunch, in something you’ve never seen before?”

It’s what I do. And there’s oceans about what I do that you don’t know. No one knows. Except my wife. And for some reason, she hasn’t left me. I’ll never figure out why, ‘cause I’m a frickin’ disaster. But she sticks around. Some things are best left as mysteries, aren’t they.

See. I can do magic at work, ‘cause I crash and burn at home. All the time. The headset they use, the augmented reality one that they couldn’t get working for three weeks, before they said, “Let’s see what Freddy can do to help.” Yeah. That afternoon, the headset was working normally, and everyone was going, “Ooo,” and having a blast trying to follow instructions written in thin air next to circuits they were trying to fix.

Yes, I fixed things. But only because I spent over a year figuring out how those damn headsets work. Got an entire system at home that I use just for that. Hook up the headset, and see what I can do. Had to do clean reloads of the operating system every other day for a month before I got anywhere. Have three of the damn headsets, well, three cheap copies of them, sitting on my desk at home, where I’ve torn them apart to figure them out. Traced the circuits, monitored the timing between components. Have you ever spent months tracking down where electrons move in something? And why they move where they do? Months staring at sheets of hexadecimal numbers, searching for patterns in them that tell you when events happen, how the headset responds to those events, and how it’s all translated into pixels displayed on a plastic lens in front of a human’s eyeball?

Before you can figure it out, you have to crash and burn, and make every frickin’ mistake there is to make. Hell, people forget that. They get lazy. They learn to walk by crawling, then trying to stand up. And they fall over 80 zillion times, and bang their heads on the floor, or the table, or the chair. They land so hard on their butts it bruises them. But, they keep getting back up, and trying to walk again. Until they figure it out. Until they learn to balance themselves. Learn to maintain their balance on one foot at a time. Learn to move that balance point around, and keep their body parts positioned to maintain that balance.

But, you get them past learning to walk, and they stop learning. ‘Cause. Making mistakes sucks.

Damn, I hate lazy people. Lazy, scared people. Want to scream at them, “If you aren’t making mistakes, if you aren’t falling face first onto the floor, and crying about a broken nose. If you aren’t bruising your ass where you landed on it, ‘cause you did something stupid trying to get better. Then you might as well be dead!’”

Same people will take out a gun, and spend $50 an hour to shoot at little bits of paper hung from a chord that’s 50 feet away from them. And will keep shooting at it, spending money on box after box of bullets, until they learn how to hit the target every time. And then, they’ll keep shooting at the damn sheet of paper so they keep in practice.

But, hand them a remote control to the TV and they go totally stupid. “Where’s the frickin’ ON button on this crazy thing!” ‘Cause. They don’t want to learn anything new. They don’t want to make the mistakes needed to learn anything new. “I just spent $3000 on this damn TV, I ain’t reading no users guide!”

Hell, they don’t even look at the pictures that show you how to do things step-by-step. ‘Cause it hurts their brain cells to figure out the pictures.

Yeah, my desk is a wreck. Yeah, I have to keep multiple backup copies of everything I save on my computers. Yeah, I have to slick my computers over and over again. If I don’t have to slick my computer endlessly, I’m not trying! I’m not learning! I’m not making progress!

And because I do, the idiots at work can say, “Let’s just call Freddy. He knows.”

I hate humans. So fucking lazy. And so afraid to try anything. So they don’t try. And they end up stupid. And helpless.

Oh, look. Smoke. From the headset attached to the computer. I’ve let the smoke out of it again. Another headset cooked. The wife’s gonna be pissed. Have to see what parts I can scavenge from it, and if I can get one headset working from the parts of the others. Sounds like a challenge to me. Always wanted to know how that works.

It’s just another part of the learning process. Right? I don’t screw things up, I’m not learning anything, am I.

931 words (Yes, WAY over the 750 word limit. So what.)
@mysoulstears

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This is written for Week 59 of Miranda Kate‘s Mid-Week Challenge. I needed time to fix things inside me. Now, I’m starting to wander back to writing. You can read about Miranda’s small fiction challenge here. Please, go read Miranda’s short tale this week, and any others that showed up. The tales are always little works of art, crafted with words, meant to be shared, and enjoyed. And many of them are amazing.