Letting The Mask Slip

After all this time, I think I’m beginning to understand.

I’ve spent my entire life running. Running away.

Now I think I know what it was I was running away from.

Me.

I was running away from myself.

I kept running, only I told myself that this was living. That I had to keep going. I could never stop. To stop was to meet an end, and I told myself that I was afraid of the end. That I was not ready.

Truth is that we are never ready. I’ve seen that truth more than most.

I’m beginning to realise that none of this was real. 

Not one bit of it.

And neither was I. I was far from real. I was a facsimile that I created to hide behind, but then I became that facsimile. I’m self-made and this is what I made. 

There was nothing else.

Only now can I begin to interpret what I saw in the eyes of those I had to end. The light show in their eyes that played out for them and for me in the moments before they left this place. 

It makes a kind of sense now. 

Now that I know.

I created a legend and the legend went before me. I strode into the places where angels feared to tread. Even I believed the fantasy that I’d embroidered and thrown around my shoulders. 

I was death, and if you saw me, if you really saw me, then you were about to say goodbye to this godsforsaken world.

The smiling irony of my existence is that so few saw me. I don’t mean to say that they saw something that I was not. Well, I suppose that they looked and did not find anything that was worth seeing. I hid in plain sight. On the face of it, I was a mildly inconvenient truth. But under that façade, I was a ruthless and relentless killing machine. 

Time and again I was underestimated and at the ultimate cost.

That was how I became the most successful and longest serving contract killer in the business. No one saw me coming even as I strolled right up to them. 

But I know that’s not who I was.

The thing is, I wore that costume so well, I thought that was who I had become, but really I knew that I was kidding myself. Always kidding myself.

I was never allowed to be myself. They made sure of that. I was told I was an orphan, but I think I always knew that was a lie, but when everything is a lie, does it really matter? Besides, I knew that finding that particular truth would hurt. Finding that you’d been rejected and abandoned at the outset of your life, at that point where the world hasn’t started in on you yet and you’re as near to perfect as you ever will be? No one needs to know that. I suspect that I was made for the purpose I was put to, my mother another piece of meat, broken by the state and used to provide the raw materials for its ends. She didn’t stand a chance, especially when she had outlived her usefulness. 

Then she was just so much trash.

People like that have a habit of disappearing, and no one misses them. Not ever.

I wasn’t given the opportunity to miss my mother.

My father was our great nation. Via my instructors, he instilled in me the burning desire to serve my country. It helped that by serving my country well, I survived.

To fail was to die.

And so I lived, and I lived, while all around me there was death.

You are what you do.

I bring death.

Some would expect that I also bring misery. Those two are sometimes bedfellows, but I never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it. They were all willing participants in a high stakes game. The ultimate stakes. Kill or be killed. I was the method of their demise. A tool deployed again and again, after each roll of the dice.

I never went beyond that. I didn’t add a value judgement. Not once did I think I’d done the world a favour. Who was I to say that? 

Who was I to feel anything about what it was that I was about?

Then she came into my life, just the same as I had entered life after life. Quietly unassuming. There was a time when she was not there, and then she was.

She was.

I cannot pinpoint when it happened. I don’t know when it changed. I’ve thought about this a lot. It doesn’t matter, but then it must because I kept on picking away at it. 

It could not have been the very first time we encountered each other. I was a different person back then. 

The truth of it was she changed me. I had to change. She was nothing to me when she came into my life because that was the way it was. Everyone was nothing. Including me. It was easier that way.

When a person is nothing and you are nothing, then you can play the game of death and win. Once you’re invested, everything changes.

She changed everything.

She was the only friend I ever had.

I think I loved her.

Life is a cruel joke and the joke is on each and every one of us. 

I did not know what it was that I had until I no longer had it.

And now I know. 

As I sit here in the pale moonlight and bleed out, I understand it at last.

Dying doesn’t hurt. Not at all. But then, I thought it would be this way. I have witnessed the end any number of times and I knew that there are those that choose not to allow the pain to disturb their final moments. I hoped I could be one of them. 

They say that you have to let go. That bit should be easy for me. I never had much of anything in my life. Only her. There was only ever her.

And the lies of course. They made me into a lie and they pointed me at their enemies. That was wrong. It was all wrong. 

I was wrong.

Well, now I’ve made it right.

For her.

For once in my life I had a purpose. I didn’t have orders or instructions. I took control and I did what I had to do.

I think I always knew it would end this way. I suppose I hoped it would end this way. Now it’s done, I've got nothing to live for anymore.

You gave me something to live for Janet, you gave me something real. 

She’s all I ever had, but letting go of her is the easy part.

I’m still afraid to drop the mask and see what is behind it. I’m terrified of what they have done to me, worse still is the shame of what I did to me. 

I’ve been so ashamed all of my life.

That was what I was running from. 

The shame.

Not me.

Not me after all.

Time to let go.

Time to be free. 

I have to let go of everything that shackled me to this miserable existence and return to how it all began.

I feel the mask slipping…

Oh!

It’s so beautiful!

I’m beautiful!

This is the pure truth of it all.

How could I not know that?

How could I have been so blind!

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Letting go.

That’s all it took.

It’s all gone.

I love.

So peaceful.

Love…