Seeking courage

“I saw him in the shadows, Sir.”
The man Scar spoke with had alcohol on his breath, fingerless gloves on his hands and his dirty fingers shook and poked at the wall they stood beside. “I saw him a few times, I should have followed. But, I never could be that man, Scar.”
Scar was named so because the entirety of his left face was scarred round the edges of a tablet screen. The tablet screen just looked to have been shoved into his face willy-nilly, but it was surgically put there. His face constantly glowed on that one side, the screen full of scratches and cracks.  This was the only source of light for the two men as they stood in the alleyway between the pub and the backs of poor filthy houses. “I was supposed to follow.” The man repeated, shaking even more. “I couldn’t do it.” A tear streamed down his dirty face.
“The truth is we chose the Devils way.” To prove his point, he scowled over at the street sign that read, ‘Djinn Avenue.’
“He was God, and we could have followed.” The man bellowed.
“God isn’t that powerful, neither is the Devil. It’s just Good and Bad. Beauty VS ugly. Dark VS light.” Scar said.
“You deny the shadow we saw in the mist?” The man asks, wiping a tear from his eye.
“I don’t deny the shadow. I deny his power.”
“Is that why you didn’t follow him upstairs?”
“I’ll go upstairs when I damn well want.” Scar’s face appeared to glow all the brighter as the irritation showed itself in his stance, and the other side of his face grimaced.
“You said you couldn’t be like him, that you wished you were.”
“The shadow is courage I never had.” Scar says sadly, “The shadow is only God because I never had the courage to go upstairs.”
The man started to pace, “I’ve seen the obscure man, the one with the…”
“Mirror?” Scar asked knowingly.
“Yes.”
Scar smiled for the first time, “Both the Shadow and the obscure man have mirrors.”
The man looked dumbfounded, “There are no mirrors upstairs.”
“The mirrors only show us what they want us to see.” Scar said matter of factly, almost like he’d rehearsed that line.
“What,” The man’s voice shakes a little, “What happened to your face?”
Scar smiled, but it was a smile upheld by sadness, “I wanted to be emotionless. I tried to become a robot.”
He laughed, “Insane, right?” He pointed to his glowing face.
“I can’t say it’s anything other, I’m afraid, sir.”
“I thought I could follow God easier as a robot.”
The man lit up a cigarette and looked at Scar, took the sight in as he inhaled a big hit of smoke. “You talk in a very confusing way. Do you believe in God or not?”
“God is merely a word that is interchangeable. God isn’t some spirit in the sky, it’s not some creator, it’s not what we’ve been taught.”
“What is God then?”
“God is an anthropomorphism of courage, of kindness, of natural events that bring joy.”
“So who or what is the Shadow?”
“The shadow is who we wish to be. We don’t follow the shadow actually. We become him, and he ceases to be a shadow, we live with courage.”
“So who is the obscure man, who always stands at the end of Djin Avenue?”
“The anthropomorphism of bad deeds, evil, natural disasters.” Scar carries on with himself, “We lack courage, so we don’t become Gods of our lives”
“Why would I want to become a shadow?” The man frowns, “you make no sense.”
“You don’t want to become a shadow. You want to become courage. Courage or God whatever you want to call him, is only a shadow because you, we, haven’t realised his potential. That is, we haven’t become the courage we sought.”
“Are we the obscure man?”
“Yes. It is us standing at the end of Djin Avenue.”

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