Hugo's Journey

Hugo's Journey

Anonymous

In his warm comfortable environment, an egg, Hugo decided to call it, everything was safe and serene; it was perfect, except that Hugo wasn’t content. Hugo, for some reason, had a desire, a compulsion, to leave the egg, so he started pecking at it with his beak. Hugo had a feeling that the beak was intended for this purpose, and he kept pecking, and pecking, and pecking until, finally, the egg cracked. As Hugo began to move out of his shell, he encountered two things: the cool, coarse, and grainy stuff surrounding him, he called it sand, and his many brothers and sisters, who, like himself, had cracked open their respective eggs. Upon exiting their eggs, Hugo and his siblings began to dig through the sand collectively, towards whatever lay above them. This self-excavation took hours, which turned into days, and, sometime during this process, Hugo’s beak fell off.

       Hugo and his brothers and sisters eventually pulled themselves out of the sand and into the night’s open air after days of digging. As Hugo took stock of his surroundings, noticing the gargantuan expanse above him, which he called sky, he acquired an urge, a very unexplainable thing, to move towards the blue moving expanse in front of him, another aspect of his surroundings that he noticed. It was a strange thing, this urge, as it wasn’t painful or gnawing: It was just there. It made Hugo feel incomplete within the very core of himself. Acting upon this urge, despite digging for days straight, Hugo began moving toward the expanse, the blue expanse he called the sea, and realized, quite quickly, that he wasn’t much acquainted with moving. But this didn’t stop the urge, and therefore, didn’t stop Hugo, who decided that he was going to learn how to move right now and quickly to get into the sea. So, with great determination and energy, Hugo began closing the distance.

       As night gave way to dawn-a distinction Hugo made as the big yellow orb in the sky, he called the sun, replaced the crescent white figure, the moon-Hugo was closer but still not at the sea. Hugo began to notice flying creatures, birds, circling above him. Hugo quickly concluded that the birds were dangerous, and as soon as Hugo made this judgement, the birds began to swoop down upon the beach; snatching up Hugo’s brethren in their sinister beaks. Now, with these evil birds around, Hugo’s desire to enter the sea grew, as the inexplicable urge was compounded by the immediate desire for self-preservation-the same could be said for Hugo’s siblings. What became of this was a mad dash towards the sea, by Hugo and all of his brethren. However, there was another factor working against them: the heat; it was drying Hugo out, sapping his energy, exhausting him. In the face of all of this Hugo carried on, never stopping in his long journey towards the sea, joined by the rest of his siblings, but as the distance go closer, so too did the birds: they were running out of targets on the extremity of the collection of Hugo and his siblings and were starting to strike closer to the center, where Hugo was; seemingly for every step Hugo took a bird would swoop down and abduct someone near him and would get closer and closer. Everyone left in the group was running as fast as their bodies would take them towards the sea, which they knew meant safety from the evil birds. Then, an evil bird, the most massive in the scourge of birds snatching Hugo and his brethren, decided that Hugo was going to be his next target, and as such was plummeting towards Hugo in a dive so fast Hugo couldn’t follow it. Hugo still moving towards the sea, thought he was doomed, when, out of nowhere the bird’s descent was interrupted by something hard, something hard that, as far as Hugo could make out, was thrown by a figure on the outermost horizon of Hugo’s vision. Hugo decided to call the hard object a rock and the figure a human-this human and the rock that it threw saved Hugo’s short life from the evil bird. Because of the actions of this human, as well as the consequence of a hard-thrown rock connecting with a devil bird, Hugo made it into the sea. Hugo’s feeling upon entering the sea are almost unexplainable; he felt content, despite his knowledge that he had more to do; he felt at peace; he was safe from the devil birds and the oppressive heat; he felt at home; he was always meant to be in the sea. However, despite his current elation and despite the dangerous and difficult journey here, Hugo knew that his journey had only just begun.