In the end...

…there is no end. That is the difference between life and a book. Not a story. Stories are merely parts of a book or a life. Stories that are the constituent parts of a book, shoehorned into a finite space to please the reader. Some writers may protest at this assessment. The pomposity of their convenient disregard of themselves as the original reader is a big lie. That lie distorts and corrupts. It is a fiction that detracts from fiction as an artform.

But then the artist is as selfish as they come. Whereas art is not. Art is a gift that keeps giving. This inherent conflict resides in all things. Conflict rages within us most of all. We are born at war. We enter the world crying with that rage. Over the years we swallow the tears down, going into the infinite night with a quiet indignation that can easily be mistaken for dignity.

Art speaks to us of this. Beauty is the contrast to our ugly nature.

Emily was an artist. I say was, because the Emily that I knew is dead to me. A life is a series of endings. The pain of it is that we must go on in depravation and know that we are lesser with every loss inflicted upon us.

There was a time when we were happy. I was happy with Emily and could therefore only conclude that she shared that happy state. Whether she did or not is irrelevant. Especially now. We can only understand life as we look backwards, but we live it by going forwards. The state of our conflict is all encompassing.

Emily, my Emily, lived in her own world. A bubble of art. This suited me fine. We co-habited and we co-existed, living in splendid isolation together. We were together in a way that gave us the space to be. Being around the woman I loved was enough for me. I wanted nothing more from her. I have always found the thought of neediness repellent. To become dependent on another was my idea of hell. What made our arrangement all the more beautiful was that Emily is face blind. She is a rarity. A woman who was never going to be with me for my looks. I loved her for that and also the simplicity it brought to my life.

Hell has many facets. We all fashion our own version. Some of us are lucky enough never to visit the dark place we have prepared for ourselves, but we know it exists all the same. We feel it. Sometimes we even smell it. Fleetingly as the membrane of our existence stretches and threatens to tear.

The matter of my loss was alien to me, and in this strange vagueness I was caught in a limbo of pain that stretched out into nothingness. I was both unaware of the value of the thing I lost and also the approach of the loss itself.

“I’ve found someone else.”

I heard the words, but they made no sense to me. They buzzed around my head. Landing on exposed flesh, they bit and infected me. Their venom made me lightheaded, and I stumbled to a chair to afford my beleaguered body some respite.

“You can’t…” I began.

Emily looked at me with a piteous finality. She already had. It was over and there was nothing I could do about it.

“What… is he?” I shook my head to remove some of the clutter. I wanted Emily to be OK, but I also wanted to know what it was that I had been beaten by. Who was the victor?

“He’s a scientist,” Emily told me.

My blood ran cold in my veins. There was no competing with such a status. This new man was everything I was not. A man of science had an army of facts at his disposal. He was not prey to the baser aspects of the human condition. He was the future. I was redundancy, an uncomfortable truth that was best being buried along with all the other bones of ancestors who heaped shame on our ascendency to technological superiority.

“Why?” I asked.

“He’s wanted to be a scientist since he was a boy,” she said earnestly.

I laughed.

“Don’t laugh at me,” she warned, “you know I don’t like it when you laugh at me.”

She once did. She loved my laughter. She loved me. Her interpretation of my laughter was through the lens of that love. Now she saw differently. And I saw him. I saw him and in seeing him, the innocence of her misconstruing my question transformed into a bloody-minded literalness. An unwillingness to meet me part of the way. There was only fact and no room for interpretation.

We are the people we love. We become an amalgam of all those people we care about. We see what they see, and we head towards what they consider to be important. I wonder how much of ourselves we lose in the connections we have with others. Or is it what I am seeing and feeling right now. The loss of my self in Emily. I gave my self to her, and she discarded me for another, shiny soul. I am consumable. I see that now. The betrayal is in my nature. And my nature made this inevitable.

He is here with us and between us and the instantaneous response I had that contained warmth and reassurance cools and becomes something hard and unpleasant. I do not want to give it voice, but it is there all the same.

Still, she has answered the why of it better than she could have done with words. Her reaction speaks volumes. There is no response. I am no longer worthy of a response. And yet I search for something within her. I want to see my Emily, but she is gone and all I see is the new version that she has made with him and for him. I no longer reside within this person. I wonder whether I ever did.

“I was laughing with you,” I said gently.

She scoffed. That was a reaction aimed firmly at me. A provocative salvo aimed more at drawing my anger out than to hurt me. Better for me to hurt myself and provide justification for all that happened in my absence.

It is absence that opens the door to new possibilities. Absence is ever present. A handy tool that can be reached for with the slightest of cognitive shifts. No one can be unilaterally present. Their presence must be accepted. Embraced. I realise that I could never experience the full embrace of another. A true embrace exists even when you are not in the same room. It is holding onto your essence and valuing it. Keeping it safe. Nurturing it.

Is it possible to feel the loosening of that tie? Is the detachment evident in a hug? In a look? In the feeling that decorates a home and insulates it from the cold venom of the cruel world outside?

This is no longer my home. He is here. The cuckoo in my nest. I feel sick. My nervous system jangles. I have never met him, but I am closer to him now than I have ever been. This is a sordid intimacy that scrapes ragged nails down my soul and whispers the sweet nothings that tempted Emily into bed.

Our bed.

Our sofa, the sofa we spent months searching for, only to find that the aesthetic of it could not possibly be matched with comfort. Sitting on that piece of furniture was never the experience we had dreamed of. We never progressed from there. It didn’t seem right.

They have though. They have been through every room of our home in a haze of heat and lust. Even the stairs. I do not visualise them, but that makes the knowledge of what they have done all the worse. I could remove the images. I will never clean away this feeling. My home has been defiled. I have lain in the aftermath of their coupling.

“I’d best go,” I told the woman who was once Emily.

And for an insane moment I see her for the very last time. There is compassion writ large across her face and her arm raises in an attempt to prevent my exit. Then the last vestige of who she once was fades downwards. Taken by the darkness I feel welling up in me. Her arm drops. A dead weight. I will never feel her touch again.

I turn my back and stifle an inexplicable chuckle. It is not me who has turned his back. She beat me to that some time back. I am not leaving. There is nothing to leave. All the same, I venture off out into the night and wonder where it is that I am going. Wonder where I am. There is no you are here to guide me away from myself.

I am lost.

In the freefall that occurs after my disconnection from the woman I loved, I experience the pain of landing a thousand times, and yet I never stop falling. I go through the motions. Routine is a blanket that I wrap around my broken and bruised body. My face is a brave mask. I do not tell anyone my news. I do not have the words. I’ve never had the words.

In the evenings, I vomit words out onto the screen. When I read my outpourings, they all say the same thing. Too little. Too late.

I have to do something. I am a flawed creature built to do and to be. Without purpose my flaws encircle me and scream into my tenderised brain. I can no longer do sleep. Rest eludes me. Food rots before me on the plate and any that I force through my lips curdles in my stomach. I lose weight and people compliment me.

“Looking good! How did you lose the weight?”

My only answer is not one to give voice to. I shrug, nod and smile. This is mistaken for a strange complicity tinged with humility. I’ve done hard yards to hone my body into something that others find attractive. The irony annoys me. My annoyance is its sole intention.

Sometimes, I drive past my former home. I tell myself that I don’t intend to. The lies we tell ourselves are the easiest to swallow. They are poison all the same.

“It will pass,” I whisper to myself as my car crawls past my house one night. The only light inside is subdued by the bedroom curtain.

Maybe that image is the focal point of my night out on the tiles. It begins with an invitation at work. Not official work drinks. This instead is a well-organised spur of the moment soiree. I go along anyway. The proceedings promise to be awkward and so I fit right in.

I keep right on fitting in until I’m a party of one. The jettisoning of my support rockets is inconsequential, all that matters is my orbit. I am propelled by other worldly forces from pub to pub and in age old tradition I have no notion of how I get home. There is a pub and then I am stabbing my door with the house key.

Leaving the lights off, I expertly navigate each room. On the stairs, I place each foot at the edge of the step in order to minimise the creak caused by my weight. I miss out the penultimate step, it is the most vocal of the lot. Congratulating myself on the silence I have cloaked myself in, I enter the bedroom and creep around to my side of the bed. The curtains are thick, but there has always been some light to see by. The streetlamp directly outside shrouds everything in an eerie orange glow.

This is when I return to my waking nightmare. I have slept walked into a place I have visited in my mind a thousand times. I am here, but I should not be. The reality of my imaginings crashes through the walls I ineptly built, and as everything crashes down inside me, something breaks and rips open and through that tear, the bubbling puss of the darkness spills out and infects me with an inhuman anger. I lash out at the form that occupies my side of the bed. I hit him again and again, and as I stop, I am agitated by his lack of movement.

He did not stir.

I wanted…

He did not stir.

I wanted to provoke him.

He did not stir.

I wanted him to fight me.

He did not stir.

I wanted to be the one to be hit. I wanted to be there. In this bed. I deserved that. I…

The bedroom lights flash on, and I am blinded.

Blinded, there is an image burnt upon my retinas by the flash of unexpected light.

My hands are red. I’m holding a kitchen knife.

There is an unnatural familiarity to the presence in the doorway. I blink sight back into my eyes and wish for the world that I had not. I replace one blindness for another. Incomprehension assails me.

“Who are you?” I ask in lieu of anything sensible to ask the apparition in the doorway.

“I am the scientist,” he says this in a calm matter-of-fact manner.

“You can’t be,” I tell him.

He smiles an enigmatic smile. That smile is cruel in its power. I am weak and tiny in its presence.

Looking away, I can’t help but find myself taking in the bloodied mess I am responsible for. The other side of the bed is empty.

“Where is she?” I ask without looking back at my nemesis.

I know what he will say, a special brand of de ja vu reserved for me and this moment and the moments that will fall into place after this. It has been a long time coming. Everything has always been leading up to this act.

“Safe.”

He says the words as I mouth them. Synchronised mimicry.

“Interesting.”

Again, my lips move, and the words come from the dummy in the doorway. A tear slips down my face shaming me. I hope he doesn’t see it. I know he will.

All that is left to me is to lift the duvet cover and reveal the face of whoever I have consigned to eternal slumber. This is the last thing I want to do. I want it to be the last thing I do. And in a way it is. Only some endings are not the end. They only herald an unwelcome beginning.

I scream soundlessly. My head is an insulated studio where the music of my agony plays over and over. For one maddening moment, I expected the peaceful face of another ending to be that of my one true love. But when the truth was revealed, it was far worse than that.

“What have you done?”

I say the words and I know he is mouthing them. This is some of how it is now.

“What have you done?” he echoes.

“I’ve…” I cannot give voice to this profanity, but then I do, “I’ve killed myself?”

I turn to look at the scientist. He is stood in the doorway of my bedroom. He is stood in the doorway of his bedroom, and he is wearing my face. And I am wearing his face. And the butchered man in the bed is wearing our face.

“Why?” I ask.

He crosses his arms and smiles another of his shit-kicker smiles, “I’ve wanted to do this science since I was a boy.”

The callous use of Emily’s words sends a scalpel-sharp chill right through me.

Emily.

“Where is she?” I ask my maker, my gaoler and my master.

“Which one?” he asks.

A sense of dread clutches at me, encircling my heart with icy fingers, pulling me forever down into the depths of despair.

“You’ve…” I begin.

“Retired her?” he’s nodding, as though she were merely a kitchen appliance that had worn itself out and outlived its usefulness, “she had certain… flaws…”

I cannot help but think of her flaws. Those were the things that made her, her. Those were the things that I loved about her. Her blindness to our faces. There was no face value to her. The childlike simplicity with which she engaged. She reminded me to let go of my pretentions and be in the moment.

“Her art…” I mourn the loss of her art. And that mourning deepens and wounds me further as I realise I never saw any of her art. I thought I had. There was a feeling. The shape of a memory that was never my memory.

The scientist nods with my head, then he points at my knife, “lose that.”

Automatically, I drop it on the carcass of my fallen brother.

“What now?” I ask meekly.

“You interest me,” he says beckoning me over, “come, we have work to do.”

Now I remember.

There is a white tiled room under this house. Bigger than it ought to be. This is where he works. I remember the work.

It hurts.

It always hurts.

I want it to end.

Sometimes it does.

The form in the bed is testament to that.

But it is not the end.

I am proof of that.

The scientist will never stop.

“Why?” I say to his back.

“Because I can,” he tells me.

Because he can.

And he will never stop.

And it will never end.