Message in a Bottle

John gazed out of the kitchen window in a fantastical trance. The world outside this window was a carefully crafted fantasy. The garden was overgrown now, but still it described a form of order that he could not exert on the aspects of his life that really counted. Life was wayward and chaotic. It presented a pretence of order for a while, and then it would unravel however a person reacted to the undoing of all their efforts.

This John knew, was a death of sorts. A harsh end that handed him an opportunity to begin again. The assault course through to the beginning would build his strength so that he was equal to the challenge of the next phase of his life. He breathed a sigh that wracked his body with sadness. He hurt in ways that were unfamiliar, even though he had been here before. The body’s memory was necessarily fickle. The body only lived in the present moment. No past and no future. John was all too aware of the animal he was, and right now, that animal was wounded and maddened with the pain of wounds it did not see coming. He wanted to fight, but he neither had anything to fight against or for. There was no point in fighting for himself. He’d done that already and inflicted losses upon himself in the mistaken belief that he could win a battle that only he had attended.

A single word formed itself within him.

Time.

This concept weighed heavily upon him. He felt old and maybe he was. There was none of the youthful exuberance left for him. This was the last, downhill stretch of his life and the fork in the path had been hidden from him, so that by the time he realised Vicky had taken it, it was far, far too late. There was no going back. Time made life flow in one direction and one direction only. Or so it was said. John wasn’t so sure about that. He’d experienced all of time’s tricks and been assailed by its wanton use of him. Time was a label slapped upon one of the many faces of chaos and John was too scared to remove that label and peer at what lay beyond.

Looking down at the turgid washing up water he experienced a slip in his reality. The dirty dishes had been spirited away to the drainer, but he had no sense of how that had happened. He was here, but he was not present. He almost did not bother upending the washing bowl, but the dirty water offended him sufficiently to provoke a reaction. The action performed, he left the bowl asunder. A simple act of defiance that reminded him of the expanse of hurt that lay beneath him and would not allow him to relax or to sleep. 

This hurt was not his own. He had been gifted the pain by another. By others. A terrible pass-the-parcel. The music had stopped and here he was. His inner teenager had awoken then. He’d kicked against John’s raw and bleeding side and raged at the unfairness of it all. 

This is not my fault.

And it genuinely wasn’t. For once in John’s life, he had not fucked up. Oh, there were lessons to be learnt. The presence of the pain told John that. But the teenager was right. This wasn’t his fault and it just was not fair. John had wallowed in that unfairness for some while. He lay there in that poisoned cocoon for far too long. The drug that seeped into him was soporific. He bathed in the lie of it. He pretended that someone would see how unfair his plight was and come and rescue him. That someone was an idealised Vicky. She would find her way back to him and make everything alright again. Only she could do this.

He waited.

Time punished him for his foolishness and amplified his pain. That pain pinned him in his prone and pathetic position and mocked him. He was ashamed of who he’d become. He was ashamed of how he had gotten here. He wanted to die, but didn’t have the honest strength to deliver that mercy. He was getting what he deserved and a dark part of him relished the self-pity he drank in gluttonously.

As he crawled away from that place, he worried away at questions that he could not yet answer. But he did it all the same. There was a utility in this. The words he found were stilted and fell short, but they paved the way for him to live the answers that were required. He was at last doing something that was needed. 

And yet he dare not look up and face the enormity of his now lonely existence. He did not have the courage to face the world, let alone step out into it as himself. Instead, he put on a face and called it brave in the frozen state that it presented. This was not him. He did not know who that was. Not yet he didn’t. He tried not to think about whether he’d ever known who he was. Better to consider his former self as dead and buried. That John was no longer with us. The new one would emerge from its chrysalis state in due course.

Thoughts of his history began to emerge from the depths of his grief. He must learn from history in order not to repeat the patterns of the past. All of this was necessary. He was moving forward at last. He repeated mantra after mantra to encourage the eggshell thin positive state that he needed in order to do the work on the other side. 

All the same, this Saturday dragged him along the cheese grater of his pain in a protracted and disinterested manner. The weekends were the worst. The weekends were where the Hole resided. In the week, he could grab a hold of routine and throw himself at work. His beleaguered body was familiar with this and it relished going through the motions. He found that other tasks came easily in the evenings. He shopped. He cleaned. He paid his bills. Sometimes he even slept through.

Mostly sleep played with him in a bed that had grown too big and cold for him. He lay there begging for the caress of slumber and when it eventually came, it tossed him and turned him until he was good and ready for the witching hour. Every morning at 3am he was smashed awake with an accusatory thought that had turned up mob handed. He tried to reason with the crowd, but it was too big and he was weak and tired. If he slept after that, he did not remember. All there was as his alarm went off was nausea and fatigue. Another joke at his expense. The feeling that he could now sleep. The desire to sleepwalk through the day. But the day was too jagged and cruel to allow him that comfort.

There was relief in the face that was reflected in his watch face. The afternoon was here at last. The moment of weakness could now be indulged. One of his guilty pleasures. He was after all at a never ending wake.

Crouching, his knees fired off warning shots that he did not heed. He opened the cupboard door to reveal a depleted stock of spirits. Previous visits were a matter of retrieving the bottle of single malt and bringing it together in a union with a tumbler that he would then celebrate twice over. 

This time, he paused at the door and looked inside the cupboard. His initial motive might have been a guilty stock take. Taking stock of his weekend drinking and the need to replenish a cupboard that had been teeming with bottles before Vicky had left. Provisions for the eventuality of her sudden and brutal exit from his life.

That may have been how it started, but then time wove one of its spells and he was drawn to a dusty bottle in the deepest corner of the cupboard. As his eyes fell upon the bottle, he was restored to a point that had occurred over a decade ago. This bottle was, he knew, a time capsule. Shuffling the nearest bottles aside, he took the older bottle and remembering himself, also brought along the half full whisky bottle for the ride. 

Withdrawing to the relative comfort of the sofa, John poured himself a generous quantity of whisky and sipped at it as he commenced a staring contest with the dusty bottle. He knew the old bottle would win, but he could not rush this. The contents of that bottle had aged sufficiently and they were to be savoured.

As he sat there taking repeated sips of his whisky, he considered the first question the bottle presented to him.

If he could turn back time, would he do things differently?

His stock answer was no, he would not. He was who he was right now because of all that had occurred in his life. His was a life without regret. That was what his mind said. His broken heart disagreed, and he could move no further forward on this.

In asking this question, the bottle reminded him that it was his time machine. He cast his mind back to its creation and smiled wryly. Time may weave magic, but this was a magic of his own and now he would at last uncover the secrets that he had woven into the magic of this bottle. 

Leaning forwards he almost plucked up the bottle. But his tumbler was now empty and so he attended to this first. He imbibed some of the amber blood and said a self-serving prayer. This was his moment and there was nothing else to it. The world could go fuck itself right now. It had taken enough of him and he needed this. He realised he needed it more than anything. For the first time in an age he felt a warmth that went beyond the whisky. He was feeling the flame of hope within his heart and now he smiled that hope into the room around him.

Another, generous sip from his tumbler and he was up and away to the door that connected to the garage. He found a large rag, selected a hammer and wrapping the bottle up in a shroud he readied himself to smash the bottle open. He paused before this violent and sacrilegious act. He’d not even tried to retrieve the contents from the bottle. But then he nodded. Smashing the bottle was right. Symbolic of the destruction of his life. Another end to herald a bright new beginning. 

Still he paused. This was not him. He was a giver and a fixer. He was not prone to the breaking of things. This was wilful. He felt as though he was in danger of becoming the sort of thing that threw fast food wrappers from the window of a car when the easier and better option was to use a bin when the car stopped. This was a line he did not want to cross, because lines and boundaries and values were all that kept him and his life intact. Without defining a safe and good place for himself, he would have lost everything and had precious little prospect of becoming the man he saw glimpses of as his pain subsided. In the pulses of it’s terrible heartbeat he was seeing an outline of himself up ahead and he wanted to fill that space.

With a force of will and an impetuous burst of energy he brought the hammer down and was rewarded with the song of breaking glass. He stood for a while and savoured that song. Just beyond reach were lyrics of joy. He fancied he’d hear them one day soon. These were promises of better days ahead and reminders that all things will pass, however we choose to label them, for often a thing is neither bad nor good. It just is. We sully it with unwarranted decoration so we can dabble around the edges of a life instead of living it.

Carefully, he unfurled the rag and glass fell in a pile to the side of a beige mottled envelope. He gingerly pincered thumb and forefinger in order to life the envelope free and despite his deliberate actions an invisible shard of glass pierced the pad of his finger. Undeterred, he took the envelope back to the sofa. Once there, he pressed the wounded fingertip to the envelope and left it there whilst he drank more of his whisky. Satisfied that he had paid his blood price. He examined the envelope itself and the fingerprint of blood. Taking his time. Delaying the moment of truth. A truth that existed ten years ago and would be revealed to him now.

Closing his eyes, he sought something of the contents of the envelope, but all he found were the circumstances of its coming into being. The pain of another life and the solace he had sought in the bottom of the bottle. He sensed the presence of that second tumbler and was satisfied that he had not fallen so low this time. He would drink a second tumbler, but no more. The altered state that he had attempted to hide in all those years ago was for another man. A different version of the person that now sat here. That was some of why the bottle had come into being. Another end that promised a beginning where a stronger John could be more. More himself. More honest. 

He felt the contents of the envelope calling to him and he shed a tear. There was a desperate honesty here. A love letter to his future self. Well he was here now and he was about to commune with his other self.

He carefully opened the envelope. A counter to the previous violence exacted upon the bottle. This now was a loving ritual towards a religious relic. The gum of the envelope yielded and now he slipped his finger into the envelope and withdrew the letter.

His hand trembled as he held the pages before him. His eyes swam with invisible tears and his mind roiled with waves of possibilities. He could stop right now. He didn’t need to do this. The presence of a reluctant fear intrigued him. Suppressed memories resonating with the imminent future. A warning not to bring two timelines together. A deceitful scream of denial against the truth about to be revealed.

Now it wasn’t just his hand that was trembling. His body thrummed with the inevitability of what was going to happen. This was a shocking paradox of two versions of himself meeting. The words could not be denied though and before he understood what was happening, they were tumbling through his eyes and into his heart. Filling it in a way he did not know was possible. The love he felt for the broken man who had had the courage to open himself to the world and express his inner truth almost overwhelmed him, but he fought to keep himself together and ride through to the very end. He owed this to the man who had done this for him. 

And as he at last opened himself up in order to contain these words, he understood. He understood that these words came from a past that went far beyond ten years ago. This was the truth of the ages. His parents had contained this truth. He should have honoured them far more. He should have listened with every fibre of his being. He should have asked them to talk to him about all the things that mattered so that they mattered to him as much as they always should. 

As the words continued to come alive and speak to him, he saw along a path that was not only the past, but also the future. Everyone who had gone before him and played a part in his creation. His being, a culmination of the hopes, dreams and love of so, so many people. 

The truth blossomed around him and he felt his roots in it. He felt it deeply. In one moment, he was an insignificant spec in the endless universe, and yet in the next, he was everything. His connection. His place in the universe should have unhinged him, but instead it enlivened and humbled him. 

This letter from his past self, and all the past selves that coalesced in this moment, spoke to John of the consequences of his actions. He’d dreaded the warning that he’d expected to be contained in these few pages of hand scribbled sentences. He’d feared the prospect of coming full circle to the same desperate state as his past self had been in ten years ago, but instead he’d been freed of his misery and pain by the truth of the words and the infinite expanse of love that was a part of his creation and a part of him. 

These pages contained the lesson he must learn. The lesson that his pain was bringing to him. His past self had gifted him this elevation from the pain, and now he saw what he must do. John smiled as he returned the letter to the envelope. He was still smiling as he raised his glass to all those versions of himself who had been, and those who were to be, and he promised them all that he would live well and that he would embody the truth of them all.

That was the day that John really started living.