Decisions, Decisions

Emily was living the dream. She told herself this often enough. Mistook it as an affirmation when it was really self-comfort. She sucked the thumb of this thought and imagined there was sustenance in it.

Many mistake dreams to be flimsy flights of fancy. A casual sketch of a whisp of smoke reminiscent of a long forgotten fairy tale. That as we grow older we rid ourselves of fictions and work only with the tangible.

The truth of our existence is largely our fabricated truth. We create our own reality and project it onto the large screen of the world before us. We paint ourselves into a corner as we indulge in an ongoing act of misinformed creation.

And dreams are our life’s work. In the workshop of our imagination we curate a desired reality that far outstrips our current works. There is a dream within every one of us that is our opus. A masterpiece that would light up the world if only we found our muse to breathe life into the dream of dreams and through us so we would ascend to the throne of our destiny.

Emily was on the cusp of this eventuality. Standing on the brink of a mountain and considering the leap of faith it would require to give herself entirely to the bright future of her imaginings. Trusting in the wax that held her feathers in place as she rose towards a light that would burn all her fears and doubts away.

On the one hand there was Reggie. Right now she was with the man who made her heart flutter every time he bestowed his smile upon her. There was something lovely and wholesome about this man, and in how he was with Emily. Reggie could do no wrong. He knew when to be attentive and he always seemed to be there when she needed him the most. He was her saviour when she had not known she needed saving.

But then there was Ronnie. There was something about Ronnie that she just could not shake off. He’d grown on her until life without him seemed inconceivable. Their attachment was elemental. The power of it frightened her. And there was a deep excitement in the fear he stirred within her.

Her life with these two men was all consuming. She didn’t quite know how she had come to be here in a life that was both a dream and a nightmare. She knew she could not go on like this. This wasn’t her. But the madness of love held sway and she carried on even as she was lost to herself.

This was how she was built. She went with the most powerful voice in the room and she didn’t have the wherewithal to speak up. Besides which, Emily knew that this was probably as good as it got and so she quietly chose not to choose. Most of the big choices in life are a secretive and quiet surrender.

And this way of being was not unusual. In fact it was the most common way of being that there was. Most would deny that they were like this, but their protestations only added to the inherent denial of their being. And so the world turned and people burned, as the devil was like to say.

Often in life we waste far too much time answering the wrong questions. Sometimes reducing everything to an almost irrelevant binary choice. The fork in the path goes left and it goes right, but we don’t have to choose either of those options. We could stay put. We could turn around. Then there is the unexplored terrain either side of the path. Few ever look up and consider the infinite choices beyond the two dimensional map before them.

So much of life is a trap of our own casual making. In our desperate need for some semblance of control we mark the territory with our urine and strut about as though we’ve made something of our lives. Always we claim a thing is either good or it is bad when most of it is untouched by such contrived value.

Why do we do this?

Because we’ve been made to feel that we are bad and so we search for meaning in the world around us in order to avoid seeing who we truly are. We hide the good for fear that it would shame us into a death of sorts and so we fail ever to live.

We are running along a path that was never of our choosing and hoping that we will find our destination as a result of our blind effort. Performing acts of love throughout the duration of our escape. Willing an invisible force to send us a saviour with all the answers to the questions we dare not ask.

This was how Emily was. She’d had a lot of material around her to emulate. She was a repetitive legacy. A living, breathing proof of the saying that madness was doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. Minute after minute. Hour after hour. Generation after generation. Madness forever. Amen.

And so Emily gave herself over into the care of the madness of love. Because as brands of madness go, Love ™ was a well-worn and much trusted brand. Not that Love ™ was anything to do with real love. No, the brand was about lust. It was a desperate hope that there was a cheat code that overrode the need to live fully and actually put the effort into building one’s self before ever meeting a forever partner.

The kicker was that the cheat code did work for some. The shared endeavour of living could unlock the best of life. What that took was a belligerent commitment to face life together come what may. Utilising the inculcated reluctance to admit making a mistake as the basis for a life together. The originating promise of a life together was born of folly and could only be forged into significance once tested by the harsh realities of a world that cared not for anyone. A world that turned come what may.

And so the world spun around at a dizzying pace and the years were not kind to the dithering Emily. Still she could not choose as Reggie charm-loved her in his special way and Ronnie became a more and more powerful presence in her life.

There was a gravity to Ronnie that could not be denied, just as the warmth of Reggie’s charm pulled her in again and again. Emily was pushed and pulled between them until she was dizzy with exhaustion and found herself sick with worry and confusion. Still she remained unwilling to choose as she could not countenance any semblance of loss as a result of her own agency. Cast adrift in indecision as so many of us are.

Life was supposedly about balance, but increasingly Emily found that she was slipping and sliding on a listing deck and she could no longer make her actions stick as she attempted to please the two men in her life. Men who seemingly knew of each other’s existence and yet acted as though they could be the only person in Emily’s life.

Against Emily’s expectations, the madness of love did not subside into a contended bliss, instead it thrummed with an increasingly loud energy that set her teeth on edge and deprived her of sleep and comfort. This discordant energy ploughed through her leaving her with a head full of raging questions that fought all the while with appeasing answers. There was no end to the noise. She could not find the off switch to a life she did not order but was delivered all the same. Time had no returns policy and so she was stuck.

Yet she knew that this could not go on. That it would be left to her to bring things to a head. This was something that she did not want to face, but she had to. After all, it was a mess of her own making.

And so she sat down at the kitchen table and spoke with the two men that she loved with all her heart and had loved more and more each day in a failed attempt to arrive at a suitable resolution. Men who she loved despite their failings and flaws, because she knew she too fell far short of where she should be.

Emily opened herself up to these men and begged for a future that could work for them all. And as she lay her life on the line and looked for a way forward. As she gave everything she could in that moment, despite the fuel tank of her soul running on empty, she was given a glimpse of reality beyond the fantasy she had laboured within for so long.

Ronnie glowered and built up a head of steam that would burn her very soul. She knew what was going to happen next. Many were the dress rehearsals. She had been on the receiving end enough to see the signs of a script that had been played out so many times before. The worst of it was not knowing when it would happen next. Always treading carefully for fear of provoking the next bout of inexplicable and unavoidable rage.

And in the darkness of the coming storm there was no sign of Reggie. At first Emily believed that Ronnie’s anger was eclipsing Reggie’s gentle love, but then she saw it all and in seeing it all she could no longer see Reggie.

This then was all there was. There had only ever been Ronnie. Reggie was a fiction that Ronnie had used to first seduce Emily and then keep her locked into a receptive state for the reality of him. He’d whispered sweet nothings in her ear and she could have laughed at the absurdity of the revelation of those words. The words were nothing sprinkled with sugar so Emily would take her medicine. Reggie was a dream that concealed the nightmare that Ronnie was and always would be.

Worse still, Reggie was the contrast that made the nightmare real. Reggie was the mast that Emily pinned all her hopes and dreams upon. The mast she tied herself to in a desperate act of making the good real and banishing the bad. Reggie was the lie. Reggie was the betrayal that Emily had become complicit in.

As Ronnie began his latest tirade and systematically crushed her soul and destroyed her worth she drifted towards the place that Reggie had occupied in both her heart and her mind and she found that despite everything, her dream was intact. From this place she dispassionately observed the man who had convinced her that what he was doing right now was love, and she wondered what it was that had happened to him to warp him so. She watched the toddler in this man have his tantrum and understood that he knew better. That was why he used Reggie to hide this side to him. Reggie was the man that went out into the world and Ronnie was all hers. Reggie was the man Ronnie could have been but had chosen not to become. Reggie was the toddler telling Emily that he didn’t mean it, when the obvious truth was that he was as cold and premeditated in the meanness of Ronnie as was possible. There was a devotion to this dark cause that both frightened and enchanted. A powerful perversion of what could be that showed what was possible when someone followed their dreams, for nightmares are but a shadow of our dreams.

Emily should have been flattered to be included in such devotion, but she deserved better. She got that now. Tomorrow she would leave. She would wait for Ronnie to take Reggie out into the world and she would disappear from his life in the same way that Reggie had disappeared from hers before they had ever been introduced.

Tomorrow. That would do. Emily decided upon tomorrow. For tomorrow was the time for dreams. Tomorrow was when dreams came true.