A Stitch In Time

Garth watches dispassionately as he takes one of her favourite CDs and returns the case to the shelf. He repeats this two more times for good measure. He does not know what her favourite album is. She changes this preference almost as many times as she changes her knickers. This has always annoyed him. Not that she would know that.

Later, he will discard the CDs he has taken. The first that he removed sits on his desk at work. A coaster and a trophy. Removing the artwork denoting the band and album was a chore but there was reward in the appropriation.

He thinks of these acts as small victories. He wins in the performance of each act and there is a sweet knowledge in the effect these victories will eventually have on his intended victim. He is the water shaping the stone of her. And like stone, she lays there and takes it. Oblivious to his Grand Plan.

Garth watches himself go about his business and he wonders why he is here. 

The next time Garth observes the petty theft of shiny items that give her joy, he wills himself to make another selection. Two CDs to the left of the album he retrieves is a better choice. Robbing that particular coffin will exact more pain when she discovers the desecration. The pain will loop around and devour its own tail as she worries away at the why of it. Ultimately blaming herself for losing a treasured possession.

Always they blame themselves and that makes it all the sweeter. 

He wants to change the choice of album but rails impotently against the scene that unfolds before him. He is a silent witness. There is no changing the script or how it is enacted.

Again he arrives at this point in time. This is not the only visit to the past that he makes. There are many stops along the way. Only now does he realise that throughout this entire timeline his encounters are only ever with himself. She is a presence but he never sees her.

Like a dream, this time travel has no start point. He is immersed in the observation of the life he once lived without any idea how he became a tourist of his own past. He is riding a sea of merry-go-rounds all at once. Around and around he goes. When it’ll stop, nobody knows. 

For someone like Garth, watching incessant reruns of his life is pointless. There was little point at the time. There is something very broken about Garth and instead of fixing it, he learnt how to hide his brokenness whilst waging a secret war on a humanity that ostracised him in childhood. Garth is one of those people who would burn down the world if he had three key ingredients, a lake of petrol, a box of matches and a cast iron guarantee that he wouldn’t get caught.

Garth fears very little other than being exposed for what he really is. He played thousands and thousands of tricks upon her and she never suspected a thing. He got hard hurting her and he used that hard to good effect in hurting her further. Much to his annoyance he is not privy to his performances in the bedroom. Or similar performances elsewhere. The dalliances he had with work colleagues and acquaintances. He remembers one Christmas where he made a show of being drunk. Dropped a dish of vegetables and feigned a pathetic incompetence as a ruse to go for a walk and clear his head. The earlier flirtation with a neighbour paid dividends. When he was supposed to be playing happy families on Christmas Day he was instead indulging his lust and playing with one of many infidelities and betrayals that little by little and bit by bit took her apart. His revenge was Christmas Dinner gone cold.

But of course he is deprived of some of his finer moments because she is in the picture and for some reason he is not permitted to see her, or anyone else for that matter. He revisits himself in a past that seems increasingly lonely and isolated. A lone actor playing out the same scenes over and over again. And Garth has been rendered impotent in his role as voyeur. Separate and equally alone.

The dream like quality of his trips through time and the layering of cycle upon cycle mean that he loses count of the number of times he has visited each moment. He suspects that he could not count these instances even if he tried. Does anyone know the exact number of times they dreamed that recurrent dream of theirs? Garth doesn’t know, but he doubts it. The frequency is measured more by a feeling of weight than of objectivity, and Garth feels weighed down by the incessant spinning of his existence. He’s a cog in a mystery machine and his lack of clarity is a prison that is becoming darker and more oppressive as the cog keeps on turning.

Somewhere back along the track that ceases to exist as he trudges along it, he held a kernel of defiance. He had dared to speak into the darkness beyond these viewing galleries of his and tell whatever was sending him on these wild goose chases that he could do this all day. Now he has lost track of days and any measure of time as he travels back into his past. He suspects that he is beyond time. He tries not to dwell upon what this means for him. Garth has never dwelt upon such things. His focus has always been on the here and now and busying himself with a revenge that is now making less and less sense to him.

As he revisits these points in time he begins to think of them as the scenes of his crimes. He knows there are thousands more. He was relentless in his quest to destroy his intended. To make them feel as bad as he did whilst finding a fleeting respite from himself in his acts of petty destruction.

Petty and small so that he would never be held to account for the ever so gradual taking of life. He worked on tiny instalments of hate that with all the compound pain accumulated to a lump of trauma that in itself could kill an elephant via heart disease, suicide or Garth’s favourite, The Big C. People like Garth were never named as the cause of death on any certificate. They never took responsibility for anything. A silent and fatal epidemic that managed to blame the usual suspects for their handiwork. The closest anyone ever came to the truth of these petty homicides was to say the deceased died of a broken heart, but never was the cause of the breakage held to account.

Visiting her at the hospital in her final days was a highlight of his campaign against her. She’d failed to attend to her admin when she’d left him, and he remained her next-of-kin on her notes. He’d gotten such a buzz when the hospital called him and circumvented her attempt at going no contact. Better still, they delivered the most delightful of news in this unwitting contravention of her dying wishes.

The cancer had done for her. Jumping to her other breast even as they removed the first. Casually spreading its dark wings and killing her in its dreadful shadow. Thrusting deeper until it impregnated all her organs with its dark creed. The Big C was all about control and it seldom lost its game. Took its time to corrupt until it reached a critical mass and the walls came tumbling down.

The nurses loved Garth. The dutiful husband sitting at his estranged wife’s bedside even after she had rejected and abandoned him. He played the part of victim so well that he was sleeping with one of them before the week was out. Whispered his narrative in her ear as she lay in his arms. Turning the carer into a hater so easily there should be a law against it.

Those visits had been exquisite. The hospital ward had been his colosseum. The triumph of vanquishing his foe was an experience he would dine out on for an age. The narrative he used as he expressed those final moments set him centre stage as the victim. The adulation he received was second to none. He thrived in the shadow of her death.

The look in her eyes when he arrived at the hospital set the scene. She was too weak by then to resist. And when she spoke up to say she did not want him there the nurses rallied around him and reassured him that this was a common occurrence. The drugs she was on to counter the pain would do that to the mind. She didn’t mean it, and in their judgement of her, the nurses naturally took Garth’s side and aided and abetted him in his victim’s final hours.

Somehow though, she eluded him right at the end. That had stung. The doctors told him that she’d slipped away peacefully in her sleep. He’d been distraught that he’d not been there to witness her end and the conclusion of his handiwork. His nurse consoled him that evening. That was the last time he ever saw either of them. He had other fish to fry. Always had. There was never a time when he went without.

He hadn’t thought about her in years. The past held absolutely nothing for him. He was a creature of want and of need, and so there was only ever the now. Even as he revisited the past she was merely a blank form of reference for him to consider himself. He was here to see himself and from the outset of these time travels that had made complete sense to him. After all, this was his past. Any other past was of no use to him.

The change had largely occurred before he ever acknowledged its presence. Even then, it was the presence of a stranger that he could neither name nor describe. Nonetheless, it sat at his shoulder and would not be denied.

This development meant there was more and in there being more the nature of his travels changed. There was no taking back what was occurring and so he did the next best thing. He ignored it.

By the time he could no longer ignore it he understood that this stranger was him. He was changing. There was no alternative explanation. There was only him. In sensing more he felt lighter and that made no sense to him. And so he revisited the same points of his history again and again. 

As he watched the theft of the CDs he felt something he’d never felt before. This eruption of alien emotion shook him and he closed down. Refused to look upon his past until he grew weary of his own resistance. Allowed these new waters to wash over him until he recognised them for what they were.

I hurt Sally.

He did not know whether he spoke the words out loud. All he knew was that he could no longer deny the consequences of his actions and the feelings he was experiencing were regret and shame. For the first time in his life he experienced remorse and lamented his inability to address the wrongs he had committed. 

One lesson was clear. Garth could not stand against the flow of time. What had happened could not unhappen. He thought he was beginning to learn other lessons. The lessons yet to present themselves frightened him, but in considering his fear he realised that he was being freed of fear.

His commitment to the cause he was living out again and again in the past revisited was no longer an investment that interested him. Somewhere along the way he had let go. Let go of the monster that he had been in the thrall of. And in the absence of that darkness he was emerging. He experienced growth that should have occurred in a childhood of depravation where he was taught that being himself was the worst of sins and so he had learnt to stagnate and give himself over to the monster in order to survive.

As Garth’s awareness unfurled, he questioned the disjointed nature of his present dream-like existence. He awoke to his lack of control as he careened around and around in backwards circles. There was a jarring resonance here. This was a caricature of his previous existence and his frantic scrabbling at a form of control exerted upon another. Clawing his way through life in a state of terror at how far he may fall if he were ever to cease to strive and busy himself with an obsession that prevented him looking at his reflection in the mirrors all about him.

Too slowly he attended to his apparent lack of need for sleep or food. There was only the trip and the repetition of the trip. A recurrent commute to a job that must be done. Thoughts of dreams accompanied him as he spun out of control. These then evolved into a conviction that he was in a coma.

As he explored his coma state the way of such a thing rose before him. This was a journey of recovery. Covering the same ground in the search for a cure to his brokenness. His disinterest in healing and the living it entailed had dissipated in the centrifuge of the time travel that was all he had left to him.

His helplessness should have shamed him, but it had crept up upon him and made his acquaintance with a gentle touch he had at first been incapable of feeling. By the time he felt its caress it was his friend and they floated together in a surreal state that freed him from the weight he continually witnessed in the hateful avatar that was once him.

Considering Sally and the pain he’d inflicted upon her coincided with his departure from the acts he was witnessing. As he haunted the ghost of his past he became less and less invested in the violations he had perpetrated. They made less and less sense to him until viewing them hurt him.

The visitations were a re-education in what was wrong and what was right. Now he was curious as to why he had ever needed to be taught such a thing when he could feel a powerful force seemingly under him and within him whilst also enveloping him. A wonderful womblike state that nurtured him and spoke unintelligible words that meant more than any word he’d ever uttered. This cocoon knew right from wrong. Contained within it was everything he needed to know. He reached around him for the cord that connected him to what lay beyond and in his fumblings he understood that they were one and the same.

In this reconnection to that which he was always connected he saw himself anew and from this vantage point he grew lighter. At last he cared about the lost soul who had terrorised others in the search for connection and validation. 

Still he contained want and need. Wanted to speak the truth of things to himself. Needed to guide this broken version of himself toward the light he felt more and more. 

Most of all, he hoped for better. In his futile, circular journeys to moments in a dark past he had at last found hope. The spin wash of the never ending time travel had cleansed him until he could see again. Until he could be again.

He had haunted this version of himself until there was no more capacity to haunt. In that lull he had allowed himself to be the haunted and grown towards questions he would ask of this ghost of his. Found that the answers were always there for the taking. Had lain dormant within.

The question he was left with was forgiveness. Not whether he could forgive the tortured child who had never been allowed to grow up and find peace, but whether it was for him to release this man who should have known better, from his self-imposed torment.

He deliberated over the question of whether this man who chose dark monstrosity deserved forgiveness when he had sacrificed all his worth to the darkness that resides within every living thing. 

Wondering whether this was a question that was beyond his understanding he settled for an answer that he could provide. He chose to do what he could.

Garth chose to love himself despite everything. And in the love that unfolded within him there was the forgiveness he sought. At last he let go and the light he hoped for filled him until he was Garth no more and there was only the light.