The Cheekbone

So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision…there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all of that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.
--Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea

His journey over, staring at the puddle; if only he had known what it meant to say yes he thought...
*****
It began when the fattest cat he had ever seen stopped and asked him for a cigarette; neither of them smoked and he felt like an idiot as he stood there pondering how a once salacious feline got so corpulent, so disgusting. Suddenly in a puff of smoke something was revealed to him: The cigarette, which neither of them was actually smoking, puffed out an image of the sweetest, whitest, and most frail cheekbone he had ever seen .Oblivious to the boys revelation the ridiculously overweight cat whined, "You must feed me!" But all the boy could think about was the cheekbone—he so badly needed it. He felt like he was going to die until he realized that the cat had been gnawing at his ankle for several hours, and that in fact, he now was bleeding to death: "VVVVVHHAT are you doing!" he cried like a tired Ashkenazi Jew and walked away.
Afterwards, a formation flies, the tea stains on his grandmother’s cardigan, and even the formation of the clouds all painted one awfully vivid picture; a cheekbone. The cigarette, who by this time was significantly shorter as it had been consuming itself for several hours, told the boy that he knew someone who might be able to locate the cheekbone. The cigarette asked only for a small favor in return...
While he thought about it, it was not so much the boy’s lungs which pumped out the word, but more like the word had launched him backward and all that remained was a cloud spelling the word "YES!" (in yellow block letters). Now the boy, playing his part of the bargain, flipped the cigarette on its head and put it out…of its misery.
By now thoughts of the cheekbone had utterly consumed the boy. His heart beat with such fervor that his eyes were flowing with blood such that the entire universe was tinted red, the color of love. The love he had for his cheekbone caused sweat to spawn from the pores of his back and electricity to flow through his forlorn veins. But he soon realized, that in fact, he had gone down the tubular-red park slide nineteen times and doing that might be responsible for such symptoms. The Sun, outraged at such childish behavior by someone in their late teens, stormed off. The boy sat on a park bench and began to cry sugary tears; there is no room in the body for something as bitter as salt when one is in love. The Moon slowly crept up from behind the Sun and noticed the young boy crying: "What’s wrong with you?" the Moon asked the boy in a stern voice. "I wish to write poetry but there is no light for me to see with," said the boy. The Moon was so tingled by the boy’s dilemma that he lit up. So the boy wrote a poem for the cheekbone under the moonlight:
Roses are red
For they have all blushed
In your presence

Roses are white
for they tremble
with love for you

Oh beautiful one
I would work
Seventy years
For only my lips
To be graced once
By your touch

To touch you
Would be like
To touch
The Sun

And I burn to death
With love
For you

The Moon, being of a more sentimental grade, decided he must leave. The boy begged the Moon to stay but the Moon insisted on leaving and only agreed only to telling the boy one story before he left. His voice became noticeably languid as he spoke about an unnamed orb that once loved the Sun, but as destiny would have it, that they would never meet again. So the Moon descended, and the boy, overwhelmed with sorrow, wrote a haiku for the Moon:
Dearest moon
I will miss you
The most.
An unusually warm sun rose that morning and the boy headed off in search of the beloved cheekbone. He followed the cigarettes directions, may his soul rest in peace, to a little town called Wej. He wondered about Wej for several days before he arrived at a little brown house. Several knocks at the door later, a little brown dog with a big nose and dark-red robe promptly offered him a large quantity of scotch. The boy, remembering the time he vomited on his neighbor’s turtle declined the offer. After much insistence on the part of our alcoholic canine, the boy accepted. The dog, having read much Hesse, knew what the boy was after: "a cheekbone is a precious thing, my darling. You must drink it slowly and caress the neck of the bottle…a bottle is precious thing to lose but its not about losing…she left me when I was only seven years old…" The dog then continued to vomit. The tizzy boy noticed a hinged bone amongst the vomit. He lifted the top of the hollow bone and inside he found an dazzling assortment of delectable bone marrow. He devoured the succulent bone marrow and stumbled out of the house. The next morning the boy woke up and discovered that his money had been stolen: Normally this would not be a problem but this particular town happened to be expensive and no one gave "handouts." ‘If only I had known it would come to this,’ thought the boy. Demoralized, hung over, and dejected the boy cried himself a puddle; a puddle which he would drown himself in had it not been for a miracle: during the formation of the suicide puddle he noticed that instead of a common circular formation the puddle formed an arrow which pointed toward the west to a town called ----. Using a piece of plank wood, and his white T-shirt as a sail, he set off…
The first thing he noticed upon arrival was how incredibly stupid the people were. The town had been settled by the Llat family in 1786. The Llat family had a reputation for being excessively proud of themselves. Fortunately for them, their surplus of hubris was made up for by their lack of intelligence. The poor boy, having put his trust in a puddle, wound up amongst a herd of baboons. He immediately inquired from the locals on the location of the cheekbone. Much to his dismay, all they ever did was enter a frenzy: First they repeatedly murmured, "cheekbone." After about five minutes, they would tilt their heads upward, swing them from left to right and run away, failing their arms as they ran. ‘I don’t belong here,’ thought the boy and finished his sausage.
It is common knowledge that the local butcher is the wisest person in any town. Naturally, the boy headed off to the local butcher for answers. He entered a filthy white room and asked the butcher if he had seen a cheekbone. "Oh yes, I’ve heard about such a cheekbone, but it is only to be found in the East. The butcher then proceeded to flog the boy with a T-bone for being a "dirty little scoundrel."
Disheartened yet again, the boy headed over to the local port in hopes of finding a ship that could carry him to the East. A hairy and muscular man grabbed him by the thin flesh of his back and threw him into the cargo bay of a ship before the hapless boy could squeal, "—but I’m not luggage!"
The bay was pitch black with the exception of hundreds of white little eyes (not unlike a scene so often portrayed in cartoons). A colony of rats had usurped the territory from a mighty dandelion and since been living comfortably in the cargo bay. The petrified boy began to cry. Upon deep introspection, the otherwise violently violent rats decided that their anger stemmed from fifteen years of being referred to as "vermin!" by their alcoholic mother. The collective consciousness of the rat community decided instead of devastating the boy, to assuage the burden of rage and frustration through the acts of giving and kindness; a makeshift therapy until proper psychotherapy could be administered. So instead of a horrid scene which is not for the eyes of this pen and therefore I cannot depict, the rats offered the boy some tea and welcomed him aboard.
The boy, ashamed of his own behavior, explained his so far unsuccessful quest for the cheekbone, and how he was in an emotional time of his life. One of the rats had overheard one of the passengers conversing with a cheekbone, "I saw it leaving on refueling dock 1234… it was quite beautiful!"

HOPE HOPE hope HOPE HOPE
Like a tornado around the boy spinning and spinning...

After some time, the ship arrived at port 1234 for refueling. The boy had put on a bit of weight since his departure and could no longer squeeze through the opening of the cargo deck. Time was running out and so the rat king commanded that the rats gnaw an opening for the boy’s escape. Although the rats were outraged at being subjected to such, "termite like behavior," the rats obliged and the boy escaped. He thanked the rats for all they had done and headed out.
The boy was surrounded by dark-yellow sand, the color of which reminded him of the urine he was currently relieving. A camel happened to be walking by so the boy quickly took hold of its neck for leverage and lunged himself onto his smelly companion.
At last he had arrived at the city where he could just feel the cheekbones presence. Rapture burst through his veins, his shoulders rolled back, his chest expanded as all his muscles contracted and there he stood no longer a boy but as a Titan! Galvanized by his awesome new strength he began to chase a Persian. He grabbed the hairy feline by the tail, spun it once around and slammed it into a dirty stonewall. "BEAST WHERE CAN I FIND THE CHEEKBONE? The Titan demanded. Now, the bemused cat had no idea what this ballistic boy was talking about. A rumor had it, that Weasel the Cat had kidnaped a most beautiful cheekbone and buried it somewhere. Having already died 8 times, and planning to use his last death to more properly serve Mohammad, he told the boy everything he knew about Weasle the Cat. Our good boy thanked the cat for his time and cooperation and headed down to where it had directed him. He followed a trail of fur to where the soil seemed to have been loosened and unearthed the cheekbone. He picked it up and began to cry as he noticed that his hand was as pale as the cheekbone itself. And so the way the ink slowly drips and fades from my pen as I finish this story, so too the poor boy turned pale, began to shiver, sat down and died.

PS-- And there is no such thing as soul mates.