Civil War Within the Alphabet, A Cryptic Excerpt from "Christmas in Mecca"

T lived in contented comforts; he hardly gave a fleeting thought to Z. Yes, T had personally witnessed the demise of R and S, had watched time’s dispassionate march and unfeeling boot heals trample S and R into transience before his very eyes. And so somewhere deep, T held an unknown knowing that Z would come. Once, mired in a bout of self-reflection that had been conscripted by a small, transitory personal adversity, T thought back on compelling words attributed to D, a fabled letter of yore. The story of D had been passed through the ages in cryptic parables that reached T through a series of retellings and translations by F, G, H and J, tales of sacrifice and heroism where D, in final feat, proclaimed that D himself, chosen before all others, would triumph at the coming of Z and that Z was indeed only the perfected reflection and anointed realization of the “new D.” Millennia after D, L is purported to have claimed that he was the Way, that he had perfected and completed the original message of D and that L and only L was a sole path to Z.

T wasn’t so sure about anything. T pondered Z many times, often in fear. In his mind and heart, T often denounced Z as a crafty saboteur, a thief, a robber.

Somewhere a universe had been born and had died.

The sun rose in the east…

T pondered and searched and ritualized to no end, but he couldn’t seem to gather enough proof to embrace or repudiate D or L. Once, quiet by accident, T had come perilously close to the Truth about Z. But that moment of philosophical immersion shattered in the midst of an encroaching offense from S, an offense that prompted a necessary and violent response from T, a response that shaped the nature of U and was essentially a mathematically precise line regression to the self-preservationist impulses of the oceanic, gurgling existence of A and the grunted cave art of B, a response justified by the vengeful commandments of C and deaf to the forgiving restraints sermonized from the mount by L.

Time’s boot heals stomped left, then right, ashes and dust, and T’s eyelids now drooped and an insight unfolded from within…or was it a voice from outside?...that told T that Hitler and Gandhi are the same soul in different circumstances, so who can judge?

T’s eyes closed and he became the whole alphabet.

U’s eyes fluttered open with a cry.