“What is the meaning of freedom?” a young boy asked me, “How can I know?” I replied to he, “The meaning of freedom is complex and that,” I continued as he lowered his hat, “...that is something which only you can decide, living your short yet significant life, we have not found it through our long lives. Only the meaning of our own can we devise…” This I told him for I cannot utter a meaning which is the same for both of us; each other; this meaning which I find collecting dust, unobserved; a single meaning is unjust.

The boy uttered not a whimper, merely casting his head down, his own confusion on life; do his spirits drown? I watched as the boy wandered off, to ask the next soul; no one knows the answer, from here to Seoul… The boy’s feet has trudgen, trudged through many lands; I, a simple man, could not help but lend a hand. “What is the meaning of freedom?” he asked my friend. My friend gave an answer, yet it did not bring joy to this land.

“Oh, why is your answer not the same as him?” He said pointing to me, my eyes dim, dim with the face of uncertainty, the ponderance which never leaves; the only certainty. “My friend gave his answer,” my friend spoke of me, “Yet I gave mine; my friend likes to prattle and pass his time, I am not him and he is not me.” my friend says, leaving my humble statement be. For how can we answer what does not make us free? The answer to the meaning of freedom cannot be…

Constrained neither by words nor constrained by folk, freedom must be free like the bird born from yolk; if freedom could be defined and passed through its time, are we not trapped in an eternal rhyme? This cycle… it continues; this meaning, it beams onto… a withering faltering stalk. I balk, at any who can walk; uttering the line:

“Freedom is…”

“Meaning is diminutive, belonging only to one person; can I not have my own, a lonesome son? The son of my father and son of my mother, how can I or anyone else even bother; to say we are the same? To even my siblings, we do not share a name; how can they speak of me all the same? We can carry blood, we can carry tears, but can they speak of meaning to me I hear?”

I said to the boy but he could not hear. The utterance, the continuation, the continuing time; what is this meaning which puts us in bind? The words which lock us in a cage, look for others wiser than you to turn the page? The boy is locked in ever resounding grief, I could not save him with my own belief. He like all people surely do; seeked and sooked meaning new.

“Is freedom worth all the forlorn tears?” I asked the boy yet he could not hear, the words have fallen onto deaf ears. Because I know that meaning to each person is queer, something you can not ever pin down; only approximate, extrapolate, or else it drowns.

“Go journey out and find your own answer, for none of ours will make your heart a dancer; dancing without a fear, only your own will satisfy you, you hear?”

This I told him and so he set off, to continue this journey of his on ground not soft. The boy continued and he so wept, no one could answer for him and so he lept into the world on his own; the lone boy traveled under his own star which shone.

“This meaning, this thing, this thing we all seek; why am I to be alone, why do we weep; if I forced my meaning into what you seek, are you ‘free’ as a bird finding what you seek?”

This line I only uttered to myself, not for him, nor anyone else. This tears, this pain, this search for meaning again, drives me asunder with pain in my brain. This meaning, this happiness, this sadness anew; I’ve found my answer, have you?

It’s that few things have meaning and no one can say, truly that at the end of the day, “We are the same way,” we are not. Any answer which satisfies us all will burn hot, so hot that no one can deny, yet this shallow night only the stars and moon linger in the sky.

Can we follow philosophers like Locke and Rousseau, a social contract for safety to be born anew? Can we follow those who say we have rights? All are but words uttered to the uncaring night. What is meaning and what is not? On my search for it, my heart is no longer hot.

The boy is but a reflection of my wayward soul, lost to time and forever old. Now but an ember cooling down; in tears has it been doused and in time it has drowned. The boy left me to search for it too, this meaning; this thing I have given onto…

The next one who wonders, the next one who pondered, born here or yonder; I do not know. The boy kept going, changing in many forms; his soul finding answers, only to forget forlorn. One day a young boy, the next a young girl; they asked the questions full of allure. Philosophers have asked them for ages; in books there are answers, but they’re mere pages. No one can answer for us all, the curiosity lingers, from the heavens it falls.

An answer, one which only one can grasp; this meaning, this freedom, for only one does it last. My own personal freedom, my own personal dreams; this meaning I hold to my heart, bright as it seems, is filtered through my own lens; and so I see the only one who can answer to past self is “Me”.