One More Time

I’m the lucky one.

You make your own luck.

I do wonder about that. I wonder about a lot of things these days.

Days.

I wonder about so many things, and now I have added another to a list that has become seemingly endless. Days have no meaning to me now. How can they? There is no meaning other than the meaning I choose to create and attribute to my reality. Precious little of it sticks. There is no gravity to hold it in place and so it floats away into the infinite.

I wonder whether God was lonely before He began the creation of other beings. Or perhaps loneliness was a consequence of His acts of creation. Without contrast nothing makes sense. There is no light without dark.

There is no me without you.

I love. I know I love because I contain a world of grief. I am a storm barely contained by a flimsy tent of bone and meat. I billow and ripple, but somehow I remain pegged in place. By accident. Never design.

Mine is a listless path, but true all the same. I go around and around, and sometimes I smile to myself and whisper, “let’s do it again. One more time.”

One more time, for luck.

Look.

For an age, I could not bear to look. Seeing was believing and I will never believe. I am not made to do so. I can go so far and yet no further. Maybe that is why I am destined to continually travel this road to nowhere. A road without end. A road with a view of the worst of ends. A view that I must bear witness to without ever understanding why. Only that I brought myself here, and now here I must stay.

The road I travel wasn’t a road at first. I made the road. That I suppose is a meaning that stuck. We travel roads and paths. That is how we are. That is who we are. And so I made this a road. A tangible experience that I could get a hold of. I needed something to hold onto when I lost everything else.

I have travelled so far. Further than most. But I never got to where I wanted to go. It took being here to understand that my destination was right here all along. I could never escape the destination of myself. I was running away, whilst always running towards what it was I was fleeing. And so it is fitting that I will always remain on this journey.

My cause was worthy. I hungered for knowledge. To go further than most. To be tested. I made sacrifices to the altar of knowledge when really I was in the pursuit of selfish betterment. I flew solo even after I married Laura. Even after Brent and Tara came along. Told myself that my example would more than compensate for my absences. Absences that were acutely apparent when we were together. Mine a restless spirit in constant search of its place in the world.

And here I am. My place at last found. As far from that world as can be. And yet tantalisingly close to what is left of it.

For a long while I questioned this accident of being. Raged at my puzzled reflection and despaired at this travesty of a destiny. No going back. Only forwards. Every time I came back to square one I knew that this was all there was. All that was left. All there was ever going to be.

World now at end.

Amen.

I got my self-centred wish. I flew close to the sun and when my feathers fell I was too distracted to understand what was happening. One of the privileged few to be afforded a perspective denied to most. Gazing down upon the world from Mount Olympus. A god for a day. To say that the view from this rarefied spot was beautiful falls far short of the glorious experience of being. This was not only a view. This was not as simple as seeing. I was bathed in a transformative wonder that for a wonderful while made me whole.

Even then, as perched precariously upon a throne that was not mine, I knew that having been touched by the Hand of God, I would be set apart from everyone. Even those who had been where I had been and done what I had done. There is no understanding this. No incorporating this into our being. We hold it within us and it holds us. We are rendered different and will no longer fit where once we might have.

I sometimes think that I found what I was looking for after all. The answer to my ceaseless quest. That there was no answer. That I was the wrong question. A mutation of a gene that could never belong.

Forty two.

That joke has got tired and old now. I was forty one when this journey of mine began. And on my forty second birthday I had a ringside seat to the end of the world. I didn’t know what I was witnessing at the time. There was no way of knowing and I could not go beyond my belief in the permanency of all our realities. A need to know that life would go on regardless of my insignificant acts.

That’s how he managed it. Despite all the things he did. The way he rode roughshod over policy and convention. Broke all the rules for the greater good. Despite each and every transgression growing in size and stature. He was emboldened by the succession of his forays beyond the boundaries of decency. And so too were his adversaries. Jealous toddler siblings fighting over toys that were always far more than toys. Innocents dying in the fire of egotistical rage. Never a thought for the cost. Consequences were for losers as they played their losing game.

And yet no one thought he’d ever do it. The ultimate deterrent was just that. Never intended to be deployed. Besides which there were safeguards. Just as there had been safeguards to prevent wars that he started on a whim.

The end was impossible. I witnessed the impossible. The world ended with an unsatisfactory sigh. No final words. The lights faded and the colour bled away. The shining jewel became a lump of coal. Drowning in sorrowful disappointment. I was Cinderella and I overstayed my time at the ball. No going back and no prince to save me. My fairy godmother was a con artist. She used me for her entertainment, just the same as I used myself throughout my excuse of a life.

And so I orbit a dead planet in a sorry and sordid limbo. For an age, I thought this my punishment. Racking my brain for the sins I committed to warrant such as this. But now I know I was merely a happy accident. Not forgotten. Made. Somehow I became a fact in this universe. I just am. My disconnection from the reality of a world that once was, was made permanent in the dying throes of everything I ever was and everything I ever cared about. I have become that disconnection. I am outside everything.

And here I am. The same as always, with no prospect of ever changing. There is nothing to change me and nothing to change for.

The oxygen should have run out long ago. The power should have stuttered to emptiness and failed. I should have starved. The aging process should have claimed me in the stead of disease, cancer or a broken heart. Then good old wear and tear should have seen my floating coffin degrade and eventually fall from grace.

None of that has occurred.

It never will.

I’m here to stay.

Why? I’m not sure I’ll ever know. But I have plenty of time to find the question to my answer.

Forty two.

So near, and yet so far.