Carpe Noctem

I’ve been called many things over the years: the Spirit, the Guide, Fate… all paint me in a way that portray clarity and endless wisdom. I suppose by definition that is mostly true. I am the clarity that arrives to enlighten those that stray from the path of which they are destined. It is a gratifying position. Time moves forward and the lives I touch will either embrace my visions or turn against me and face a future of sorrow. Either way, I move forward. Time never ceases and thus neither will I. 

To say that I live is only a half truth. I exist, I distribute my enlightenment, and then when my task is finished I move on to the next being in need of my services. I was never born and I never died. I just am. The longer I exist the more I wonder of my own path. How did I come to be? I do not remember a time from before. I do not remember why I do this time and again. I only know that it is my driving force for eternity. And for so long, this was okay simply because there was no other option. The mere reality that I may question my own destiny is not only blasphemous but inherently ironic. Thus, I relish this human attribute in solitude. There are none other as me to complain to, anyhow. 

That is, until I was tasked to enlighten a certain man who was headed toward definite destruction. 

This enlightenment was one that might have been written to be a tale spoken in the dead of winter to bring warmth and warn of the wickedness of greed. I arrived as I always do, with complete knowledge and clarity of his past, present, and future. All of his choices, his inner thoughts and desires, his selected path and the one that he was turning against became an obsession. This is how it always becomes. If I fail to turn him from the wrong path, though I continue to exist, I develop such great turmoil. What good is my existence if my only reason for being is ultimately ignored? 

I arrived in stealth; he could not see me. He sat alone surrounded by others in similar standing at an energetic pub about a block and a half where his life will come to a halt if I did not change his mind. He finished off his third pint that he had no intention of paying for. He was broke, after all. He had just been laid off at the factory. This was the third time this year and due to this, he was set to be evicted from his apartment the next day. As far as he was concerned, this was the end and tonight was just the final celebration. 

“What’re you looking at?” he mumbled when he finally noticed me. In his eyes, I was exactly what he wanted me to be. Just a figment but real enough to appear as anyone his brain could conjure.

“I’m looking at a man at his end,” I answered, and with this he shook his head and took another gulp of a fresh pint. 

“Shouldn’t you be celebrating somewhere? It’s New Years. You should be dancing the night away, not sitting next to a loser drinking his last beer.”

“You’re right. I could be anywhere else right now.” With these words I surprised even myself. Glancing around the pub, I could see the desperation. Masks pulled under chins in pointless defiance. Morality on the line in hopes that for a single moment they might just feel something, anything. These were souls caught blindly without enough sense to realize they were caught in the first place. And the one next to me would die in only a few hours. Would anything I had to say truly make a difference? Would he not continue forward in his artificial suffering? Perhaps I had found one soul that might serve as a void of my own frustrations. After all, who would he tell in death?

“I have lived a million lives and I have been to every corner, nook, and cranny this world has to offer. I have counseled kings, peasants, slaves, and the infamous… and in the end it all amounts to the same. For as long as time has reigned, humanity’s greed is never pacified, and thus it is my work to attempt to change this before it is too late. And do I ever truly succeed? I do not know,” I spouted without any hesitance. He sat there, holding his beer between his hands on the counter, seemingly soaking my words.

“I see everything with such strong emotion that it nearly feels… real. That I might too be able to feel these same things. But it is not real. It is only a way to help me understand how to help you. To give you the correct words to realize that your life is worth more than what you are willing to do, or not do. And once you understand, you will go on another twenty or thirty years before suffering another breakdown and then it will all be useless again. Humanity is fragile that way. And even still, what I would give to feel it for myself! You don’t understand what you were given. You might be broken, but you can feel it! You can dig into it! You can turn that brokenness into a story of triumph, and then feel the healing that comes with it. It is all beautiful. And you’ll never see it or understand it like I do. And it’s a shame.”

He blinked and eyed me again. This time, really looking me up and down and finishing on my eyes.

“Some poor bastard really shattered your heart, didn’t he, honey?” he said as sincerely as he could, and I knew he was being sincere. I had no choice but to know. 

“Lucas, heed my words. If you climb into your Ford pickup truck tonight, you will collide with a minivan carrying a young family headed home from a night ringing in the new year from a grandparent’s house. You will kill everyone in that van and live only long enough to know what you had done and then die with immense guilt and shame. This is the moment I tell you that if you only call your brother Tom to pick you up, not only will you save that family, you will live on and develop an app that will change the way investors do business all over the world. This is the night where you go from rock bottom to becoming a human that will become a success story. All you have to do is believe me.”

I didn’t sugarcoat it. There was no need. Why fluff and fool at this point? He listened, which was more than I expected. He pushed his pint away and dug his cell phone from his pocket. He scrolled his contacts until Tom’s name appeared.

“I don’t know who you are or how you know those things… but I’ll believe you. Maybe you’re a New Year’s Angel.” He grinned before pressing dial and with that I faded away. 

Another success. Another night in a sleepy town where a head-on collision never happened. An entrepreneur was born and instead of ending in tragedy, he lived many more years and touched many lives with positivity. 

My job was done here.