The Nothing Boy

This is a story about a boy who disappeared entirely.
There one day and gone the next.
A boy too old not to be considered a man,
but a boy nonetheless.

To care about his absence, you must understand his presence.
He was always kind and always courteous.
He was brash and he was indulgent.
He was a good boy.

Abiding by time, as all things do, life neither halted nor turned.
Yet, somehow… he never really grew up at all.
Bored down upon by stunted complacencies,
the boy's fears and future became one.

However,
life is like an ember waiting to be stoked or extinguished,
and for the first time in his life,
the boy was fed tinder.

For a brief and beautiful moment, he blazed,
but beyond unaware.

Blinded by the burning glow he himself was admitting,
he did not see nor feel the inevitable smothering.
Never suspecting he’d be the one to throw the sucker punch,
the boy knocked himself out.

That was the very moment he began to be diminished.
He couldn’t take back what had already been cast.
Black and blue, he didn't know how to recover.
Festering, the boy began to rot.

As the self-created illness ate more and more away,
the only thing he could do was to watch and cry.
Numbing himself but still feeling everything,
a hopeless understanding sunk into the boy.

Not long thereafter, he was taken away completely.
No one really seemed to notice he was gone.
Life went on.
Fires still burned,
as they once had in the boy.

But for what was blinding is now black.
The pain was replaced by nothing,
and nothing was peaceful.

That was enough for the boy.