The Common Man

I couldn’t tell you his name. He’s always there. Like some spectre, a constant reminder. Who is he, I wonder? And how to describe someone you’ve never met? This is what I think. I’ll call him the Common Man.

He doesn’t have a name. I think I said that already.

He refuses to discuss serious matters, political, religious or otherwise. The careworn look on his cracked, muddy face suggests things had been different once.

If he finds himself splitting hairs between arguments, he’ll resort to points of fact to disentangle himself from the mire. His opinions are always expressed as such and he wears around him a cloak of anonymity.

A profusion of dark facial hair is still ripe with colour after all these years. He has no one, an estranged mother, a distant father, and his principles take root in an early Christian upbringing that refuses to budge. Little does he know how much he is directed by this.

He hangs with other alcoholics at the fountain on the common each day, but his participation is transitory, liminal, somehow abstract.

The Common Man maintains a remarkable serenity that masks a virulent streak of bitterness, anger and discontent. Whether it was through a rare kind of knowing wisdom that he overcame this facet of his nature one will never know. Perhaps it had rather been the result of years of frustrated desire and hollowed out hope, beating him down to a semi-confused, pottering weariness.

Yet there is something different about the Common Man: his stride, confidence, and contemplative face suggest otherwise. Something to indicate all this has been judged out, reflected upon, voluntary, deemed right. Like the sails on a ship deliberately brought to mast so the wind can carry you along as it must.

The Common Man has not always lived in this country.

His goals are unapparent, as if undergoing a steady and unnoticeable process of negation. He was educated when the meaning of the word was different.

He has no work. He is calm, composed, or ready to flip. Hobbies, interests, there were some. A deep down fear of being left alone though this has always felt what he’s been driving at.

A heavy smoker with a deep, dark secret. Like every other character.