A young man sits in a smoky cafe with a college-ruled notebook open in front of him. The pages are blank, he’s sipping his terrible coffee Americano, and he’s spinning his pen with his free hand.
An old man walks into the bar, but he looks like he’s already been drinking. He is a fisherman. His hands are bleeding.
The air is hard and smells of cedar.
“Don’t despair,” the old man says, moving up steadily to the young man, with a look that penetrates him to the core, beyond even his blood. “You are a man, and a man can be destroyed but never defeated.”
There is a pause until the young man can speak without shivering.
“But sometimes I feel so much pain and doubt,” says the young man, “It’s as if, all of the sleeping and all of the insomnia, that it’s all for absolutely nothing.”
He is having trouble breathing.
“A man can bear any pain, that is his gift.” The old man stares hard at him, and extends one of his bleeding hands. His eyes are so clear that the young man reaches for the hand. “Just do something that you know – do something you know, and something that is true.”
“Like what?” asks the young man, with a new life in his cloudy green eyes. His brain feels smooth and his breath now comes quickly. He is no longer twirling his pen.
And he looks at the old man until he sees it.
The old man opens his mouth to speak. The young man begins to cry. The old man’s eyes are sharp and clear. He pulls out a gun.
“Bear all pain,” he says, because he noticed the tears, and shoots himself in the head.
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