A Beautiful Collection of Terrible People

I have a collection.

Not stamps. Not coins. Not those ridiculous little spoons people bring home from countries they cannot point out on a map.

I collect people.

More specifically, people who have wronged me.

There are currently forty-seven entries in my little black notebook. Each has a name, a date, an offence and a suggested punishment. Some are quite creative.

Number twelve stole my lunch in 2014. I hope he enjoys food poisoning.

Number nineteen laughed at my haircut. I hope he goes bald.

Number thirty-one married the woman I loved. His punishment is still under consideration.

I am a very patient person.

My mother says I should let things go. My therapist says the same. I stopped seeing him after he suggested I might be the common denominator.

Unprofessional.

But number forty-seven is different.

Number forty-seven is the reason I started collecting people in the first place.

And tomorrow, after seventeen years, I am finally going to meet him.

It began on a Tuesday.

I remember because Tuesdays have always seemed unnecessarily long.

I was nine when my father died. A car accident, the newspapers said. A careless driver, the police said. A tragedy, everyone else said.

I called it murder.

The driver was a young man named Adrian. He was nineteen, drunk, and apparently in a hurry to get somewhere important. He survived. My father didn't.

I never saw Adrian again.

But I remembered his face.

I remembered the photograph in the newspaper, his stupid smile, his perfectly ordinary existence continuing while ours fell apart.

I promised myself that one day he would remember us.

For years, I imagined what I would say when I finally met him. Sometimes I would slap him. Sometimes I would laugh. Occasionally, in particularly dramatic moods, I imagined standing in front of him and saying nothing at all.

Silence is underrated.

Then, last month, I found him.

He was giving an interview on television.

Seventeen years had changed his face. There were wrinkles around his eyes, grey in his hair and a tiredness that photographs couldn't hide.

He was a counsellor now.

Apparently, he spent his days helping people rebuild their lives.

I nearly threw my television out of the window.

The universe has a strange sense of humour.

I began following his work. I watched every interview, read every article and listened to every speech. I learnt that he volunteered at a local centre, helped recovering addicts and occasionally visited schools to speak about road safety.

I hated him more each day.

Or at least, I thought I did.

The opportunity came when his centre announced an open volunteer programme.

I signed up under a false name.

My plan was simple. Get close, earn his trust, discover something terrible about him and expose it.

I had rehearsed several conversations in the mirror.

"Do you remember me?"

"No."

"Of course you don't."

Very satisfying.

My first day was disappointing.

He was shorter than I remembered. His shoes were worn, his shirt was badly ironed, and he laughed at one of the children's terrible jokes.

I found this offensive.

I had expected a monster.

Instead, I found a man who remembered everyone's birthdays.

He knew which children hated vegetables, which ones struggled with reading and which ones pretended not to be afraid of the dark.

He even remembered my fake name.

That irritated me most of all.

Over the following weeks, I kept returning. I told myself it was for research. I made notes about his habits and weaknesses.

But my notebook began changing.

Number forty-seven: Drinks tea without sugar.

Number forty-seven: Stays late when a child is waiting for their parents.

Number forty-seven: Doesn't like being thanked.

Number forty-seven: Laughs loudly.

I stared at the last entry for a long time.

Then I crossed it out.

Ridiculous.

One evening, I found him sitting alone outside the centre.

He was holding an old photograph.

My stomach tightened.

It was a photograph of my father.

I recognised the crooked smile immediately.

"Where did you get that?" I asked.

He looked up.

For a moment, he said nothing.

Then he asked, "Are you his child?"

I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell him that he had no right to say my father's name.

Instead, I sat beside him.

He explained that he had kept the photograph for seventeen years. My father had been carrying it when the accident happened. It had somehow ended up among the belongings returned to him after the investigation.

He had tried to find our family.

But he had been afraid.

"Afraid of what?" I asked.

"That you would look at me and see the only thing I have ever been."

I hated that answer.

It was a selfish answer.

He told me about the accident. About the drinking. About the prison sentence. About the years he spent trying to understand how one stupid decision could destroy so many lives.

He didn't ask me to forgive him.

He didn't even ask me to listen.

He simply said he was sorry.

I had imagined this moment for seventeen years.

In every version, I was powerful. He was frightened. I walked away victorious.

But now I was sitting beside a man who looked more frightened of himself than I had ever been of him.

I didn't forgive him.

I don't think I was ready.

But for the first time, I wondered whether I had been punishing the wrong person.

The next morning, I opened my notebook.

Forty-seven names.

Forty-seven reasons to be angry.

I read every entry.

And suddenly, something became terribly clear.

I had spent seventeen years keeping these people alive in my head. I remembered every insult, every humiliation, every betrayal. I had given them rooms in my mind and furnished those rooms with my hatred.

They had moved on.

I hadn't.

I turned to number forty-seven.

For a moment, I considered writing a punishment.

Instead, I wrote something else.

He is not innocent. Neither am I.

I closed the notebook.

It was strange how quiet the room felt.

I didn't become a better person that morning. I didn't suddenly forgive everyone. Number twelve still deserved food poisoning, in my opinion.

But I decided not to add another name.

That afternoon, I returned to the centre.

Adrian was helping a little boy tie his shoelaces.

He looked up when I entered.

"You're back," he said.

"Unfortunately," I replied.

He laughed.

I almost did too.

And for the first time, I wondered what my life might look like if I stopped keeping score.

There is one thing I haven't told you.

The notebook has forty-seven entries, but the first page has always been different.

It contains no punishment.

Only a name, written in my father's handwriting.

A name I have spent seventeen years pretending not to recognise.

Because the accident wasn't the first time my father had been hurt by someone.

And the driver wasn't the only person responsible for that day.

I was there too.

I was nine.

I had taken the keys.

I had begged my father to drive me home.

And when the car came towards us, I was the one who distracted him.

I have spent seventeen years collecting terrible people because I couldn't bear to collect the truth.

I opened the notebook one final time.

At the bottom of the first page, beneath my father's handwriting, was my own name.

Number One: Me.

My name is Elias.

And I think it's finally time I stopped being my own worst enemy.