BEING DONE WITH IT: A SHORT STORY

All kinds of things, most all of which were irrelevant to who he really was, or would turn out to be, were heaped upon him since birth, all kinds of expectations, a certain education, a certain physical appearance, a certain set of manners, a certain kind of extracurricular activity, a certain kind of friends, and from these all the subsets of expectations spiraling out like the frons of a fern. And these one by one he did eventually because he found that he could not get rid of them without doing them. He had to do them to undo them. Doing them purged them from him. Even the blog he had been writing year after year, a stream of consciousness on eastern spirituality, was an undoing by doing, a purgation, a being done with it, a purification.

So now here he was all these years later and he had done everything, been everywhere, met everyone. All that was left for him was to be done with it once and for all, to make the declaration, "I'm done with it."

Unfortunately, in the scheme of things where opposites arise mutually, where you cannot have one of something without the other of something, "being done with it" meant starting it again, being at the beginning again, not at the same beginning, but at a beginning nonetheless. Samsara was the word for it in India, reincarnation. Which was why his declaration never did come. Which was how he was now done with it.