Years after Gatsby's death I returned to West Egg, interested in doing bond work for some of the newer residents there. Whilst visiting, I came upon the darkened graveyard where I knew Jay Gatsby had been buried, so I turned in to see how the times had treated him. Even after death, I was appalled at the way people seemed not to care about him at all, his status as a fellow human being ignored.
His greying headstone was cracked, green grasses growing through the shattered stone and obscuring his once finely scripted name. Flowers had obviously been left there over the years, though whether the once bright pink roses and deep blue cornflowers had been left for Gatsby, or had simply blown over to his grave, nobody could know. Now, it did not matter, as they were brown and wilting, simply squashed petals littering the concrete lid of his grave.
I sat against the headstone, watching brown leaves fall from the trees and slowly flutter towards other graves, settling daintily upon them. It was still so difficult to think of the exuberant man known as Jay Gatsby as dead, for it seemed as though his extravagant personality and passionate love for Daisy would be something fixed and unmoving, never to be extinguished.
Gatsby had never truly told me of his past, which was really to be expected. Everything I had known was found out through other sources, either through Tom's frantic searching of the man's past, or through Daisy herself. Even though I was used to it while he lived, it was a bizarre concept to know very little about a man who I had been great friends with, and had now passed on.
What had I known about him? At first I thought he was in the drug trade, but then Tom brought to light his bootlegging years… I knew that he had worked for Dan Cody for years on his boat until Cody had mysteriously died, and all had assumed it was at the hands of Ella Kaye. I knew that he was passionately in love with Daisy, and wouldn't hurt her for the world, and yet he was so vehemently against her having even a little love for Tom.
I knew that he was a man who had devoted his life to making money and hosting perfect parties and buying expensive things just for a chance to see Daisy once more. I knew that his death was almost like an acceptance. It was as though he was waiting in that pool for death to come, as he realised he had lost Daisy when he'd tried to force her to say she had never loved Tom.
It was at this point I had stopped my inner monologue and realised that this was not how I had wanted to remember Gatsby. I had wanted to remember him as an elegant man who would do anything for the love of his Daisy, a man who had found precious and beautiful people and purchased precious and beautiful things to entice back a woman he had not seen for years, but deeply desired.
I couldn't listen to people like Tom (a rabid fool I had not seen since my college years until I met him in the Eggs, and even then I dearly wished I had not had the pleasure of his company again) or any of the other people who had such poisoned views of him. Which eventually I sadly realised left only me. I was the only one who had been his true friend, all of the others at his party were lying through their pretty facades, they had no interest in Gatsby. In fact, most of them had never met Gatsby in all their time there. I felt disgusted at the way people would use a man for his extravagance and not even attempt to meet him.
But, as expected, the time had come to go. I had reminisced enough, spent enough of my time in a grey graveyard, where souls had been sent to rest and prosper in whatever came after death. Yet, I was still of the belief that one soul that rested there did not deserve that fate, that his death had come too soon. Gatsby deserved to have his name known throughout the land, with a Mrs. Daisy Gatsby on his arm, for I somehow knew she had loved him far more than she had ever loved Tom.
As I stood and brushed the dust off my pants, I noticed an etching in the side of Gatsby's tombstone, and a single flower of colour that had been blown under the wilted ones. The etching read "I never loved him", and the flower? A daisy.