The Inheritance…

I am not a super hero. I don’t even possess a special talent. I can’t paint (not anymore I guess), can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t play any musical instrument, can’t make speeches or recite in public. I am not a millionaire either. I wasn’t born with any gifted skill, intelligence or entrepreneurship. I am just an average bloke – a face lost in a crowd. Someone who passes you by in a rush on fifth avenue who you don’t even look at. Maybe I was born without a face at all. You don’t know me. You never will.

I am lost and I was perhaps just placed on this planet to serve as a prop in the background. I did not have a beginning.  I will not have an end. When I am removed from this life, someone else will replace me and fill the void. I will not be missed. I will not be remembered.

What did I do to earn this nonessential existence? I will never know. Perhaps I am too insignificant to even qualify to seek these answers. Here today, gone tomorrow without a whimper. People who know my name will not take long to forget it. I will be passed on as a photograph on a wall for some time and then eventually find my way into a closet or in a cobwebbed store room. My belongings from this journey will be distributed, used and eventually be destroyed too. I won’t leave a legacy not even a scribble on an epitaph. There will be no teachings, no secrets of life revealed.

Hey you,

The one they call, a child of mine. Do you even belong to me? Have I known you from a life before? What did I do to have you by my side? I know that you will not even hold on to my surname and all that I accumulate will be passed on to a stranger and I don’t even know if you will be by my side when I close this chapter. I don’t know if it will even matter at that point and yet I want to give you something for being there around to soak in all I had to offer during my journey.

I don’t know if whatever I bequeath you will actually make a difference to your life. My earning has been meager, my experiences limited, my learning confined and my endeavors constrained. Perhaps the only thing you will actually get from me is a piece of my heart that I set aside only for you. It may not suffice and you will not really be able to pawn it for a measly piece of bread, yet somehow it will hold you whenever you need someone to come and sit by your side. It will be a sponge to soak a tear that breaks at your lip and falls. On nights when you are cold and need to hold on to something, it will serve as the piece of coal you could throw in your fireplace and catch a wink looking at the amber remnants.

It will not be much but it is all I can perhaps offer. It contains a dew drop from a morning that I stole off a window pane when I kept awake all night nursing your fever, a spoonful of honey that I gathered wiping off all walls when you choose to leave your paint soaked hand impressions in the living room, a broken song in your voice when you were learning to pick up words and a half-baked cake you made for me from the mud in the garden. It is assembled using the pieces of the jigsaw puzzles you loved putting together and is held in place by the strings from the rope of the swing I put for you in the front yard.

I guess the piece of my heart is essentially a little chunk from your own life that I have been saving for you to take you back to the same realm of innocence that you would lose over the years. The day I am laid to rest and crumble to ash take some of it and add a tear to it and knead it into a little heart shape the way you used to do with your little lump of red play dough.

In that moment, you will bring me to life once again and I will sprinkle a little sunshine on your face and light a little smile and you will have claimed what is rightfully yours to keep and retain – till you pass it down further to who come after you. That will be your inheritance and my gift of life to you.