Your Personal Tragedy
The two of them sat on the hood of the hearse, turned towards each other, feet resting on the front bumper. Light from the sun reflected off the black metal and disappeared into the gray atmosphere of the afternoon. If either scooted approximately a foot closer, their legs would touch. He knew she lacked the ability to acknowledge that the space between their bodies contradicted whatever emotional intimacy they shared in her fantasies and he found himself unable to feel the conviction to make her see. Sometimes it felt like he could see the spaces between everyone and everything, especially the ones no one else seemed to notice. Him, with his addled, twisted mind.
'Well, Eli Goldsworthy,' the girl's voice cut through his musings. It had an effected musicality he had yet to classify as agreeable or wearisome, 'I think you've finally let go.' she said.
His eyes vaguely took in her red polo, black rimmed glasses, and dark brown hair tied up in sporadic ponytails. The corners of her lips were turned upwards with victory. In return, he smiled a smile with a crookedness that hid whatever feelings lurked inside his heart. 'I have,' he gave her a nod before detaching his eyes from hers, letting them rove across the surroundings of the lot. The grayness stretched across the parking spaces and the sidewalks and the concrete steps that led to the glass doors of the brick building. It seemed everyone else had disappeared: none of their peers could be seen and no stray voices could be heard. He could feel her eyes still on him, intent and unrelenting.
'I'm so proud.'
She placed her left hand over his right. She could feel the back of his fingers against the palm of her hand and noticed the tension, the way his knuckles were raised and his fingers bent in order to clutch something. But she could not see what it was in his hand..
'What's that?'
He looked down in his hand and saw his fingers curled over something in his palm. Only then did he notice the stiffness in his fingers resulting from being bent into the grip for a lengthy period and the pain in the middle of his palm where the object pressed against the flesh. Suddenly he felt the full force of a pain that had had time to grow.
His eyes darted back up and made contact with hers behind the lenses of her glasses.
'It's nothing. Here,' he said, handing it to her, adding wryness into his crooked smile, 'Bury it in carbonite.'
She extended her hand without hesitation, the victorious smile still playing on her face, growing. His fingers ached as he uncurled them, cramped from being wrapped around the item for too long. But there was a disconnect between his and her movements and when he loosened his fingers the object whisked past hers and fell to the ground of the parking lot. He followed its descent with his eyes, waiting for the impact to come, trying to predict the damage. But the impact never came. Instead, the object continued to fall, against the background of the blackness of the street, defying countless rules of time and reality. His eyes darted back up in order to make contact with those of his companion, to confirm that she too was seeing the extraordinary occurrence, but she was no longer there. Nothing was there, anymore. The blackness extended all around him, replacing the car and sidewalks and the steps and the building. He could no longer see his own arms or legs or any part of himself.
'I'm dying,' he thought. 'This is what its like to be dead.'
But then, why could he still feel himself? He felt himself in his body. The soreness in the fingers and palm of his right hand remained.
'Or maybe this is what its like when you've finally sunken into true insanity,' he amended.
He paused his thoughts and gave himself a second to take in the new reality.
'It's not that bad. Just me and my thoughts. Death or insanity, its not that bad.'
Somehow his view angled back down towards the item he had dropped. It stood out, the only thing in the darkness, falling as if in slow motion. Slowly, it morphed into a triangle, widening on one side and narrowing to a point on the other. A circle manifested, attached on the tip of the triangle, and on the base of the triangle, there were two parallel lines, resulting in something that looked like a crude drawing of a female, like the ones on doors to women's bathrooms. The figure continued to fall against the backdrop of black, a cluster of two dimensional shapes that somehow became three dimensional. He could see every facet as it plummeted. The solidity of the black began to disintegrate until there were millions of white drops streaking down, raindrops, plunging with the speed of bullets. The silence filled with the cadence of rain hitting pavement. The object appeared again, but it had come to a stop. It was no longer a cluster of shapes, no longer a simplistic outline of a girl, but a real girl; black skinny jeans and a black t-shirt over a red tank, and long hair, dyed black, draped over delicate shoulders. Face down on the street, blood pooling beneath. She was dead. And it was his fault. Now, he could see a vague distinction between the black tar of the street and the blackness of the night sky; the black on which she lay and the black that surrounded her. Reddish and yellowish lights flashed somewhere in the distance. Perhaps they were the lights of the car that had hit her or of the ones arriving to take her away.
The rain intensified until he could no longer see the body. When it weakened and he could see again, his vision had left the scene and was traveling along the street. It came to a halt in front of a driveway. He saw the two of them standing on the porch, his arms wrapped around her. Both of them were dressed mostly in black but smiling widely, euphoric from the contact with one another. Behind them, he could see his car parked in the driveway. The two of them continued to hold each other and watch the rain from beneath the protection of roof. He remembered. It was before he said the things he shouldn't have said. When he made that realization, the image dimmed slowly until he was left in complete darkness once again.
'What can I do?' his voice questioned in the blackness where he now seemed to live. He knew he had to do something to fix it, because he had been the one to break it. It was only fair. But he would never be able to bring her back to life.
'You could give me a field of flowers.' a voice said playfully, sweet, young, familiar.
It sounded nice.
'I will,' he decided.
Then there they were, him and her, standing in a field of gray. But flowers filled the field endlessly, each and every blossom gray but with a slight tint of blue, making them stand out, ever so slightly. Everything else was gray except for her eyes and hair and lips. Her eyes a pretty blue, her hair a vivid reddish brown. Her lips were a deep red.
He liked her color and that she didn't know about the pain he carried with him each day, about how it had conglomerated and then crystallized until in was a sharp point digging into the flesh with which he carried it, not letting him forget its existence. When he looked at her color, the pain dimmed. And for that, she could have all the flowers, and any others he could find. But in the almost perfection of the scene, he noticed an oddity. The redness that made her lips was growing, stretching across her face little by little. The lips parted and opened to reveal a black hole between them. The flowers gravitated towards it, pulling themselves from the ground, ripping their roots along with them. It sucked them in like a vacuum, the intensity increasing with every second that elapsed. And her mouth kept stretching. It stretched until it met the ends of her face and then it stretched off of her face. Her mouth continued to open and widen, the lips becoming redder and redder, more pronounced against their monochrome surroundings. He couldn't see her anymore, the blackness eclipsed her. All that was visible was the black thinly outlined by red and the blue tinted flowers disappearing into it. What had seemed a never-ending field of blossoms disappeared in little more than an instant and the red that had outlined the black was gone as well.
It was time.
He lifted up the back of the car and flinched when his eyes came into contact with what he had been avoiding for over a year. But he pushed himself to take hold of the torso of the body and drag it out from the compartment. There was a strange limpness to the body's weight . Her skin had become paler, and the bright sunshine of the day illuminated it, making it easy for him to see every detail: rips and scratches in her flesh that must have been inflicted by skidding across the street, the dark reds and browns and blacks that colored rotten wounds. Reddish brown strands of hair hung down her back. Had her hair always been that color? No. That was blood that had soaked into and stained the tresses
'Here, help me,' he said to the figure standing close behind him. With no signs of reluctance the person came forth and took hold of the limp legs.
He maneuvered the body so that he could support it with one arm, and used his other to reach and shut the back of the hearse.
'But this-' he thought. The memory of a crash flashed across his mind. 'Morty is gone.'
'What happened to your friend, Eli Goldsworthy?' she asked casually, drawing him away from the inaccuracy. She shifted the legs of the corpse so that she could carry the weight tucked beneath her right side and under her arm. With the hand of her free arm, she pushed her glasses further up the bridge of her nose, her dark brown hair, tied in pigtails swayed in the breeze.
'I thought you let her go?'
'No," he said. 'I never did.'
His eyes snapped open and he felt the springy solidity of his mattress beneath him. He could feel a pressure in his eyes: tears that existed not only in dreams but also in wakefulness threatened to fall from his eyes. For a moment, he felt the sting in his right hand that had been present all throughout his dreams, but it was only a trick of the mind. He closed his eyes again and mentally collected the images before they melted back into his subconscious. When he felt sure, he opened his eyes again and let them adjust to the darkness of the room. When he could make out the object in the darkness, he stood and walked across the more than slightly disorganized room, feeling his feet tread over scattered pieces of paper and other random materials. His laptop lay on his desk, beneath several old notebooks, some empty popcorn buckets from the local movie theatre and receipts from recent and not so recent purchases. He pulled the laptop from the other items. The light from the laptop stung his eyes when he opened it, and he had to squint for a few seconds before he could look at his desktop. Intuitively, he led the mouse to click on the Microsoft word icon and a new document appeared. He centered the cursor and in bold capital letters wrote LETTING GO and beneath in much smaller letters, not in bold, he followed with, by Eli Goldsworthy.
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.
-Ernest Hemingway