Moving Into Eternity

Akshan spent his last day in Arrowwood like he spent all his days in Arrowwood: gardening. Acres of open plains surrounded his house, and he filled one with an eclectic collection of foliage. That’s all he ever did, really. The bus came to pick him from school every morning at 8

and dropped him off back home at 4 in the afternoon. He was too far away to play with any friends from his 5-county schools, and his ‘backyard’ was nothing but tall, dry, dead grass. His solution was to just grow something to play in, which ironically became the playing itself. Cedar trees, pineberry bushes, and birds of paradise grew around a central bench he had constructed from miscellaneous planks from old buildings in the fields nearby. It looked like an insane man’s ravings put to dirt and greenery, but from the central bench there was a mathematical order if one observed keenly enough. Engraved into the bench with a knife was his name, “Akshan Darwish” and the date he built the bench and started the garden.

His father raised Akshan by himself. He would also be the one to deliver Akshan to college, two thousand miles away in New York. When he finally came into Akshan’s bedroom asking, “Are you ready to leave?”—already an hour past when they should’ve left—Akshan said nothing and brought his last bag to the car. Just a hundred feet from his house, the garden was lost from view, and that was the finished book of his life before college. He felt like a letter. Sealed, stamped, and signed with just a sending address.

After four years, Akshan earned his degree like most people do. He graduated with an Honors in Business from Columbia. That field was not Akshan’s favorite thing, but he did enjoy it, well-enough at least. Mostly, his father strongly suggested it because he had lived such a tumultuous childhood wrestling with debt, so that he desired for his son to live a beautiful life wrestling with too much money. Perhaps that wasn’t the key to happiness, but it was all that Akshan knew. Two important things happened to him during this time: His father unexpectedly died, and Akshan didn’t go home. The flights were too expensive to waste on Thanksgiving or Christmas, and during each summer he had internships around the world. Tokyo, Dubai, London, Lahore, but none where he could be back in Arrowtown at the garden. After his father’s death, the house became abandoned, and Akshan felt no need to revisit a place of such pain and hardship.

At 44 years old, Akshan was wildly successful. His business that he created right out of college was worth nine billion dollars, and he has all the money and more that his father hoped he would have. Still, he feels unfulfilled. There is endless money, friends, tasks to complete, and vacations, but nothing in his life gives him substance. His solace remains in walks through Central Park, but he has forgotten what makes them matter so much; he just knows that they do. Simultaneously so he keeps working, not because of increasing avarice, but without a better purpose to devote to.

Akshan eventually retires, forced out because of his age. He has a wife, a couple kids, and lives in an arthritic-ridden body of 82. People adore him as an economical savant; his name is prestigiously placed in the Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Century. He has his own Wikipedia page that aspiring students read about, hoping to glean an easy secret to his success. Yet, he still feels unfulfilled, which is not a great emotion since he believes his whole life has basically passed him by. On an ordinary day with one of his young grandchildren, they ask “Where was your home? Was it anything like ours?”

“It was nothing more than a small cabin built by father’s hands–Except one thing I can’t place my finger on.” He responds.

“Did you ever go back?”

“No.”

“Why not? I would have to go back at least once!”

And Akshan remembers the garden. He spends the next few hours retelling the story with more joy than he has felt in decades. The grandchild eventually slinks away, but Akshan just keeps going retelling the story to himself as he remembers his past. Why did he never go back? Perhaps he was 82, perhaps his body ached just lying in bed, and perhaps his life was “over” in most people’s traditional sense, but he decided that he would make this journey at least once.

Akshan traveled from his country estate in Syracuse, took a private plane, and landed an hour outside of Arrowtown. Despite his family’s urging, he decided to drive himself in his father’s only remnant, a Chrysler Newport. About half a mile from the house, he began to cry. In the distance was a dilapidated shack—shockingly small for a child and his father to have lived in. A bit behind was a paradoxical forest with trees that dwarfed his old home. Akshan wept for the house, where he experiences his childhood beauty truly cut-off becoming the past, but he wept out of joy too for his garden, no forest. All that remains of his father and his house are memories; the only thing that remains of his Garden is everything.

As he parks the car and walks behind the house, the Cedar trees look even more majestic, and his garden disorganized but beautiful just like he planted it. This was his legacy; this was his life. It just stood there, unknown for a few decades to him, but never leaving. His business would eventually fail, his kids were already siphoning his fortune into nothing, but this wondrous utopia remains. He disappears into the foliage. The Birds of Paradise were so overgrown, the leaves so gargantuan, that he had to force his way through small cracks in the vegetation. At the center remained the bench, with his name carved into it, and a date of a man so far detached from who he is now. Yet as Akshan sat slowly onto the bench, his little life became whole, and he felt the eternity of the world.