• Home

The End Is The Beginning

Posted on March 26, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

Look at anything you’ve used for a while from a different angle and you’ll see details that are easily missed from any other perspective. Like if you happened to be lying with your right cheek pressed to the cold hard floor, left eye being the only one capable of recording visual information because its companion is pressed shut. In such a position you might see a pen you’d imagined long lost, when in truth it had merely rolled under a low sofa, to collect dust and become a stepping ground for all manner of insects and whatnot.

It is important to view things from different angles and perspectives. Mine isn’t the dominant position or perspective right now. It’s not just my cheek that is pressed to the ground. My chest hugs the unforgiving floor so hard that it is difficult to breathe with anything less than the greatest effort for the shallowest intake of air. I’m probably getting more dust than air into my lungs. My head is so flat against the floor it may go right through it. Anything to ease the pressure of the metal cylinder pressed down to my left temple. I am at the wrong end of that cylinder and I fully expect, at any moment, to be separated from all that binds me to, and gags me about, my human existence. I expect to miss all of this a great deal. At an exact moment, not of my choosing, that finger will squeeze the trigger and send a lead projectile crashing through my head en route to a fast and messy exit out the other side where it will flatten against the floor and join a mess of whatever it is that passes for the contents of my skull. There is nothing I can do about it, not right now anyway; nothing except think of how I never thought to look under the sofa for that pen.

Life is good, love is better and money, money is the condiment that can make the whole dish very tasty indeed. Too many people chase the condiment without worrying about the actual meal. That’s how I got into my current state, playing ketchup so to speak. My name is Adrian Grey, seems strange to acknowledge it but there it is. Most days, we never think of ourselves as Bob or Sallie or Sharon the Catering Lady; most days, we are unique and the whole world is expected to revolve around us. Of course, if we ever got some perspective on what ‘the world’ encompasses we’d never want any of that shit revolving around us, period.

With time, the world that we expect to revolve around us gets ever smaller until we run our families like little fiefdoms. There is carnage and martial law until one day there is an uprising and then, we die. Things were supposed to be different with me.

I always had the time to observe things before making a decision. I had time to plan because everything happened later for me than it did my peers. I imagined how I would be the perfect boyfriend, lover, husband and father. Too late I realize imagining is not planning.

The way we see a world not affected by us is never the way we can look at a world or a life or even an event that we have some impact upon. Think about the last heart you broke or the pained expression you brought to a friend, lover or employee’s face and imagine how you would have reacted if you had witnessed this act of breaking a heart or causing pain from the outside. It is the difference between us and them. We are the world, they are the ocean.

The floor continues to reshape my cheekbone before a .45 bullet redecorates it with whatever is used to process these final thoughts. I spend a moment wondering what it will feel like and I have to close my eye to push the thought away. The thought of my impending death is quickly replaced by a million nebulous images of lives destroyed, starting with my own.

It is really easy to find a goal. All you need is to be painted into a corner. The reason more poor people become rich than middle class people do is that the poor get properly sick of their corner. The middle class only experience discomfort, never agony. The reason why abused children become gifted musicians while the progeny of strict parenting merely becomes rebellious is that the latter doesn’t really experience the pain of isolation within a supposed safe haven. It was easy for me to decide that I wanted to be rich. I hated being poor. From that hate sprung a need so great that it slowly but surely consumed everything else.

The gun is cocked followed by a moment of absolute silence. It is ready, to send me into an oblivion that I have dreaded, every single day since I became aware of death. I am forty years old and it doesn’t look like I will have to wonder about the pressures and responsibilities associated with turning forty-one.

Comments