The confidence of faith

By the nineteenth year of his life, Dante felt he was cursed. Whatever he thought about, at least, whatever he imagined to be, it never came to pass.
He would sit alone, music bathing his ears, low lights filtering out what he didn’t want to see in the room. He would try, try very hard, not to imagine a thing, maybe not to think about anything at all. That way, he could be sure that his imagination would not destroy the possibility of the future.
When Dante was a child, his burgeoning life was filled with possibilities. He would imagine what he was going to do when he grew up. The careers he would have, the countries he would visit, the great love affairs he would enjoy.
He saw his life stretching out before him - a rich platter, a joyous miracle to come. He thought about it, almost daily, as his teenage years gathered momentum. What times were to come! The excitement sometimes left him giddy. He’d sit there, sit in his room with the music filling his ears, lie back and stare at his dreams.
When he was eighteen he left home for the first time to attend a university. The road of the life he had forseen, he was now travelling.
He saw Beatrice on the third day of his first university semester. A voluptuous vision of hope, the first step on the road to his envisioned life.
That night he sat in his dormitory and imagined their first meeting. His vivid mind planned every nuance of the conversation - the speech that would make her fascinated by him, the ideas that would entice her passion for his precious soul, and later the words that would bring their entwining.
On Friday, the fifth day of the first university term, she was there as he had imagined, leaving class alone. All the confidence of faith, a faith built up across the divide of almost nineteen years spinning upon this human planet, carried his legs towards her and allowed him to begin the conversation he had rehearsed so many times this week, and pictured almost infinitely throughout his recent adolescence.
The first barrage floated with perfection from his lips. She gazed intently, focusing on every syllable. Her first reply, however, was alien to his mind.
Her voice, the very structure of her sentences, moved freely and independently of all his thoughts - of his entire constructed experience.
A crumbling edifice, his rhetoric was as dry as his tongue. His mind, as empty as his mouth.
Beatrice shrugged and said ‘bye’. Dante barely encountered her again.
A retreat to his room. A final hard look at his imagination. A real fear came upon him.
Dante knew now, he knew nothing about the world. Everything was an uncertainty. If he stepped from his room, he could never be sure, again, that the floor would support him.
A film of panic clung to him. He shook a little. The cold realisation of how hard his future would be. The realisation of how much easier life could have been had he discovered this truth, years ago. This realisation clawed at his heart.
Dante stared hard at the handle on the thick wooden door that separated his dormitory from the outside world. He tried to imagine what was on the other side, but all he could see was a world with no floors and many, many opportunities for him to fall.

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If you enjoyed the tale, try this one: The blonde man.