Gone

You’ll never be content

The note is there on my bedside table when I awake. 

I have awoken to an empty bed in a room that holds some familiarity, but little comfort, and I turn to see the note. The note is leaning casually against an untouched glass of water and I can read it from where I lay.

You’ll never be content

That is all that it says. There’s no greeting and there is no name to sign it off.

I sigh as I stare at the note and will it to reveal at least some of its mysteries. It does not. Instead, it glowers at me balefully as though all of this is my fault.

I wonder if it is. I rummage around in my mental wardrobes and drawers for something that looks like blame. My blame, not anyone else’s. I come up empty handed. I don’t even bother to go looking for anyone else or anything else to blame. It’s not that I’m gallant or that I am beyond such nonsense, I just can’t be bothered. What’s the point?

The note has a point and maybe I should heed it.

Getting out of bed is not easy. The energy in the room is leaking into that note. I turn it face down as I get dressed. Then I glance at the note as I pick it up to pocket it. I know what it says, it’s what it doesn’t say that I am looking for. With that one single line, it isn’t as though I can read between the lines, but I know there’s more to it than those few words. There has to be. I just wish that those opening notes would remind me of the whole tune. I fear that it is a tune that isn’t for me and I will never hear it.

I step out of the bedroom and call this progress of a sort. I clean my teeth and note the singularity of the toothbrush. It has no companion to see it through the long, cool nights in the bathroom.

I splash my face with cold water understanding that the mild shock of it should awaken me, wishing that it would jolt further recognition into the right space so it can be useful to me. It does not, and I don’t even register the sparsity of the room I stand in. 

The lack of a mirror should be a giveaway.

Then, I am in the kitchen. I take a glass and fill it with water. The glass is the mate of the one on my bedside table. I feel bad for leaving it up there. I shouldn’t have done that. I am better than that. I was better than that, once upon a time. There was a time that I was fastidious in these matters. 

Everything in its right place.

Now it doesn’t matter. Perhaps it never mattered and that is why I’ll never be content.

I leave the house, and I feel the need to turn back and take a look at it as though for the very first time. 

As though for the very last time.

I walk.

I walk away. 

I’m not walking towards anything and there is no purpose in my walk, but I hold my head high and my back straight all the same. 

I know no other way.

It doesn’t take long to get to the end of the road, not long at all. I stop and I consider my options and narrow them down to two; sit down or stay on my feet. I remain on my feet. Sitting down seems wrong somehow.

It makes sense now, and yet none of it makes sense and it never will.

You’ll never be content

The note is burning a hole in my pocket, but I leave it where it is for now. I raise my hands to my face and try to discern how I look. The absence of the mirror makes sense now and I know I will not discover anything worth knowing with these hands of mine, a big part of me does not want to anyway.

Does this mean that I am resigned to my fate? 

It would only be something else to lose in the end.

I take the note out of my pocket and read it one more time.

You’ll never be content

The note is real. 

I am not.

I think I was once, or I was on my way to being.

I look from the note and up along the direction I was walking. There is nowhere further to walk to. I don’t turn. I know what I will see, or rather what I won’t see. 

I can feel it.

It is gone.

And soon I will be gone.

***

The writer peers at the screen as he opens his laptop and it lights up.

He takes a sip of his much needed morning coffee, a swirl of steam alights on the left lens of his glasses, but he pays it no heed.

You’ll never be content

He shrugs at the screen and the words he wrote late the night before, finding them a little out of kilter with who he is and how he rolls. He’s never killed a character off like that before, and so soon after creating them too. Maybe that is why he wrote those words in italics at the bottom of the page. 

A final death knell for a character that never was. 

Did they count? 

He wonders this as he deletes the whole document. If the content a writer produces is never shared with a single living soul, then does the content count and do the characters ever have a life?

He shrugs again, dismissing the notion and lamenting the time wasted last night as he went with an idea that had seemed so promising at first, but never went anywhere. 

His mind drifts for a moment and it takes him back all those years to a point in his life that he’d really rather not visit, a time he learnt never to revisit, that bad time when he woke up one morning to discover that she had left him and in her place was a cryptic note on his bedside table. He pats the lump in his jeans where his wallet is. The note is in there, but he has not read it since that day, even when he has replaced his tired and battered wallets, the note has remained folded and unread as it was disinterred and buried in a new resting place. 

He knows what the note says.

He opens a new document on his laptop, but his fingers pause over the keys of his laptop.

There is something that he feels he must do.

He knew what the note said.

Try as he might, he cannot remember the words.

He reaches awkwardly into his pocket. His jeans are tight. He’s stuck with the same size jeans as he got older, refusing to accept that he has grown in girth instead of losing the pounds that he needed to.

He unfurls his wallet and opens the part where the note lives. For a maddening moment he cannot see it’s curled edges and he panics, thinking that it has been lost. Then he sees it and carefully draws it forth and even more carefully unfolds the now fragile paper.

He stares at it for a long time. All of the pain of that morning floods him and with it the hurt of the aftermath. He remembers it all, but in particular the devastation and the emptiness. No one should ever have the power to take everything from you like that, he thinks to himself. 

His bones creak and complain as he levers himself up. At the kitchen sink he lights a match and holds the note as it burns. He takes no pleasure in it, if anything there is a dull sense of loss of a talisman that he has carried for over four decades. 

Returning to his laptop he resolves to give that character a second chance. Everyone deserves a second chance, the writer thinks to himself as he retrieves the deleted file and opens it.

Clutching his chest the writer’s eyes go wide with an awful recognition. Everything he wrote last night is gone.

It is all gone, save for the words he only now burnt at the kitchen sink.

You’ll never be content