Unfinished Business

Don’t worry! It’s not..!

That was when it all started. 

There was an end that heralded a beginning. The circle of life. Only this circle was broken and there was no fixing it.

Problem was that Don could not discern the meaning in any of it. And meaning was required whenever the circle broke and threatened to stutter into an eternity of chaos and pain. Gary was the punchline, he was sure of that much. But Don didn’t get the joke and he certainly wasn’t laughing. No one was laughing. The timing was all wrong, and the punchline did not fit. It didn’t fit with anything. Didn’t belong in the world. There was a shockwave that knocked Don off his feet, but here he was. Still standing.

Standing but frozen like a statue. A statue with a far-off memory of movement that threatened to fade into a tale that belonged to someone else. A lie that was told to little children as a warning. His ears were ringing, but his brain didn’t answer the call. In a single moment, Don was wrenched out of the world he’d ungratefully inhabited and thrust into a dark parody of a reality that no longer contained Gary, but instead painted a travesty of what Gary had become indelibly within Don’s mind’s eye.

Sleep became a shade, haunting Don with that vision. Peace eluded him and the path to that quiet place was now hidden, whether overgrown with despair or obliterated with sorrow.

Don’t worry! It’s not..!

Those words played over and over again. Like a prayer. Don uttering them incessantly so that they became a low hum. The backing track to a life lived in confusion and a desolate sadness that emptied him as though he were a cracked hourglass.

Don would rewind his life and replay whole tracts. He knew he’d been unobservant the first time around. He also knew that the recording was flawed because he was flawed. He’d not been paying attention and so his camera was not pointing where it should be. His recollections were out of focus. The audio set at an annoyingly low level, almost audible, a hint at what was being said, but there was not enough to establish the framework of meaning. Never enough.

He went back to find clues. His search was for the why of it. It had to mean something. He thought he knew what was missing from those few words. So few words, even if they were complete. A smattering of words loaded with meaning. Gary’s meaning.

Don roamed far and wide and he did so for what seemed like an age. He wanted something that he could never have. He wanted to exert an impossible control. A control that even the gods did not possess. He wanted to change it and in changing it, he would change everything. He didn’t care that it was not possible. He no longer cared about much of anything. He would give anything to take it back. He would sacrifice himself and everything he had for things to have turned out different.

He knew he was running from the moment it happened. He knew the truth of it even as the words were spoken. He couldn’t accept them though. He just couldn’t. The reality of those words did not fit with the carefully constructed reality of Don’s life. Nor did they fit with Gary. 

Now, when he heard those words, they were foreign. They no longer came from Gary’s mouth. They did not sound like Gary’s words in any way, shape or form. They were alien. An invasion. Don repelled them and fought them with everything he had, until he had nothing left to give.

The rest of Don’s life faded away. It was there. He could sense it nearby. But he was no longer a part of it. He went through motions that bore no relation to that world anymore, but then they never did. The music that he had danced to all of his life had been silenced in a moment and Don would never hear it again. And so he would never dance with rhythm again, instead he lurched and lumbered around in an arhythmic burp of motion.

His new existence weighed upon him. The increasing gravity reminded him that he did not belong. He had been cast out and there was no way back. It held him captive and it was taking its sweet time in crushing him. Crushing him, but never with the intent to kill. That was not its job. There are forces in this world that take. They feed from a person. But they cannot take it all. Never will they reach a state of zero. That would be no fun. These eternal parasitic forces are cunning. They diminish their host, but they never take too much. Their punishment speaks of the infinite. 

Besides, these hungry forces lazily use the host against itself and so they keep those conflicted parts intact, creating an arena in which the gladiators fight to the death, but cannot ever truly die. One opponent is humanity, it tries to reason with the other, but that opponent is not listening. It cannot. And even if it did, it could not trust what was being said to it, not in the painful darkness of the anger that they both share. That other half is the oldest part of us. The animal that learnt to survive. It is stronger than what we consider to be the best part of us and no one has ever defeated it. But then, that would be a pointless exercise. That would be to self-destruct in the most terrible of ways.

The elemental darkness knows this and more. It knows us well, and it should. It has resided within us since before we became self-aware. It is timeless and universal. It is a part of our essence. And it is a part of the balance that allows us to be. 

Don fought himself in that darkness and in his struggles he embraced the darkness and its lies a little more with every breath that he took. He knew what he was doing was futile. He knew it was wrong. There was a time when he could have just stopped. Then there was a time when he could have worked his way back towards the light. Those times came and went and when they did, Don was convinced by his own wheedling and cowardly lies; that there was no way back. He was a victim of his own bad habits and that was that. 

Only that wasn’t that. Don could have gone on forever and a day. Casting out even further into the gloom of loathing, anger and hate. His shame erasing the path he’d taken in an attempt to hold him in the prison of his own making. 

Few have come back from the depths that Don was now charting and those that do are too delirious with their new found life to describe what it was like down there. Such a description would necessitate peering back into the abyss and that was when the trouble had begun. We all hold a healthy and necessary fear of such foolhardiness. We fear the dark for good reason.

The truth of it is something like this, and it is a hard truth to swallow, but then most truth is. The point of no return occurs when a soul has ventured so far into the darkness that there is little pressure or atmosphere to support them and so their weight pulls them endlessly down. Deeper and deeper they sink, and that journey of theirs never ends. The sad truth of it is that it is the better part of them that weighs them down. Perhaps that part, the part that would shine if it were given the chance, knows when a return cannot be allowed. That it is time. Just the same as it knows when it is time to die. Only in death, it rises to a better place.

All of this and more occurred within Don’s tortured mind and heart. His gut joined in with the lamentations and screams. He was warned. And he knew. That is the terrible truth. We always know. Life is a series of choices and we make those choices, even when we tell ourselves there is no choice to make.

Life is also a circle that makes the best of us wonder whether the choices we make are illusory or symbolic. To end up at the beginning no matter what, begs questions by mortals that the infinite does not deign to answer. Not in this life. The answers would make no sense to us in the confines and limitations of these temporary bodies.

Don’s circle brought him back to the same room. The room where it ended and it also began. Gary’s room. He had not dared to revisit this room since it had happened, but now it was time. It was time, and as he entered the room he felt Gary all over again. Gary was here. He’d always been here. Waiting for Don.

Don smiled a smile of knowing and his lips moved through that constant smile.

Those words again.

Don’t worry! It’s not..!

Only those words weren’t voiced by Don. But in the end, it didn’t matter. There was no one else in the room with Don, and Don was past hearing, and he was past caring.

His last mortal thought was, loaded. Gary was loaded. He’d made a mistake. But it didn’t matter. Not really it didn’t. Gary had taken Don’s bullet. The bullet with Don’s name on it, and Don had ended in that moment. For that, Don was sorry. But it was too late to say sorry and so Don hadn’t bothered. None of it had mattered any more. Not without Gary in the world.

Under the surface of Don’s constant denial, the truth now rose up, as it was always going to. It rose up in front of Don and burnt him in a promise of eternal damnation.

The gun was loaded. 

But Gary wasn’t to know that. The gun was Gary’s and he was careful with that gun. It was never loaded. Not in the house. Not in the drawer where it was kept. The drawer in the beside cabinet to the right of Gary’s bed.

Don had loaded the gun.

Don knew that Gary liked to play his silly Russian Roulette game when he’d had more than a few glasses of Jack. Tumblers overfilled with an amber liquid that promised oblivion, but delivered something less palatable. 

Don had told himself that he didn’t mean to load the gun. That he didn’t mean any of it. The truth was that Don didn’t mean anything. Meaning was something he’d given up on a long time ago. Don knew what he was doing and he knew how it would end. Truth was that he didn’t care. 

Don loaded that gun because he could. 

Don did it because he knew he wouldn’t get caught and being caught was the only thing that ever stopped Don do anything.

Once it was done, Don was sorry. 

Sorry for himself. 

Sorry that he’d been deprived of someone who let him get away with a great deal. Sorry that he was alone and unable to pull his shit and play his games. Games that only he knew the rules to so that he would always, always win.

Don was sorry that his last game with Gary meant that there was no more games to be played. 

That was the problem with having no meaning and not caring. In the end, there wasn’t very much of anything, including a future. Don hadn’t planned ahead. He hadn’t considered the consequences of his actions. But then he’d never bothered with a conscience. 

The bullet that entered his brain should have ended the contradictions of his sordid existence and the brutal chaos that he visited upon others. Instead it transformed them, and the dragon of truth reared up before him and began burning all his lies and denial away, leaving him with only the truth. His truth.

And that truth was going to hurt like hell.

Forever.