"Thing" by Luke Buffini
We all wanted the same thing. None of us were certain how to get it. We never were and I don’t think we ever could have been. But for this reason (or another, I can’t remember now) we all decided it was actually some other thing that we all wanted instead.
This thing we did know how to get. For certain. In fact, in a lot of ways, it was rather easy to get this thing (the other thing; not the thing we all wanted to begin with). Or at least it was simple; far simpler than getting the other thing (the first one). And god did we prefer simplicity!
Yet it wasn’t so easy to get this thing that everyone had it. In fact, now that I really think about it, most people didn’t get it at all throughout their whole lives. They lived without it and went into the ground without it. At best, a reasonable number of people had it for a while. Recently some people have said that, though it might have seemed that everyone shared it or had some part of it, in reality a tiny number of people gathered up all of it and deliberately kept it away from everyone else. And yet so many people went to immeasurable efforts to make it appear that they had it. They exhausted themselves trying to appear that way. They expired many months and years reaching for some corner or edge of it which never failed to be yanked away from them at the moment their fingers tingled with the anticipation of grasping it. And each person somehow managed to make themselves feel as if everyone else had it but them! Even (or especially) the people who had more than their fair share of it.
One thing’s for sure: soon everyone was in agreement that it really was the thing they all wanted, and they scrambled over each other desperately to get at it before the other.
A lot of noses were squashed by muddy boots.
A lot of faces were trampled.
Now I find it hilarious, because it was only in agreeing that this was the thing they all wanted, and everyone working so hard to continually convince themselves and each other, that the thing became the thing they wanted at all! Otherwise, it would have just been a thing.
And all along, what happened to that thing we had originally wanted? What happened to the real thing: the thing we invented the other thing to help us forget?
I don’t know. But it seemed to me that the more we reached for the other thing, the further away the thing we had actually all wanted became. Until, in the end, we couldn’t even remember its name.
Luke Buffini was born in Hammersmith, London, in 1992. He grew up in Hillingdon and now lives in Muswell Hill. He holds an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master’s degree in philosophy. Luke has previously been published in the Short Fiction Journal, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Earth Island Journal and The Hillingdon Literary Festival Anthology 2018.
