The Death Of Me
"The past...the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather...all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember."-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
There was a man who created a monster. There was never any happy ending. He was never saved.
But everyone already expected that, didn't they?
oooOOOooo
He dies well, all things considered, fairly quickly like a candle flame smothered between two fingertips, amidst sounds and silences, with a taste of freedom on his tongue.
He's tired, worn to the bone from endless running, and in a way he always expected it, somewhere buried in the back of a weakened hope and dreams long folded up and packed away.
He doesn't mourn because there's nothing left to mourn.
oooOOOooo
By the end he didn't remember much of the beginning. He knew there was music once - quiet, he thought, soft like rose petals and satin, laughter, and gentle words of love.
He'd nearly forgotten that before there was also no such thing as fear.
oooOOOooo
Sometimes he thought he was not himself anymore, because time does that to a person, after all, shifts and molds them breath by breath into who they were meant to be all along. He was the creature and he was not the creature, and he didn't know anymore, not really, because they were fused, both of them, like conjoined twins in a single hollow form, one heart, one blood, one mind split between two, one weaker, more frail, and always failing.
One can never truly survive without the other, and if one would live the other must always die.
oooOOOooo
He met countless people, faces and names that swirled into a flesh-colored kaleidoscope, remembered and yet forgotten. He loved deeply twice and a little more times than that and lost them all eventually.
There was no reason to think it wouldn't happen that way.
oooOOOooo
Grief is an odd thing. Live with it long enough and it becomes comfortable, like a threadbare blanket he should throw away but finds warmer than a new one.
He never learned how to pick up the broken pieces and put them back together, to paste fragments of silence together and turn them into sound to block out the pain.
Perhaps it's better he didn't.
oooOOOooo
He read Frankenstein as a boy one Halloween, tucked up under the covers with a flashlight and the scent of oatmeal cookie crumbs folded between the pages, eyes wide and breathing shallow.
It's a simple story, one everyone knows in some way. A man creates a monster, the monster destroys the man.
For weeks afterwards he was afraid of monsters under his bed, shadows moving on his walls, the creature from the book coming after him, as if he was Dr. Frankenstein and his hands had formed a giant creature, a hideous being who wept at his own reflection in the water.
He didn't know why he still remembered this.
oooOOOooo
After a while he'd stopped looking at people so closely.
They're raw things, humans are, pain and suffering and little bits of broken glass all bottled up in their eyes, and he thought he understood why people become callous, because it's easier to look away than stare into the depths of it all and take it into himself.
But eventually he always looked back.
oooOOOooo
Sometimes when he searched back in his mind he remembered that there were others like him once.
He thought this was important.
oooOOOooo
He didn't cry much toward the end.
He'd gotten used to life, it seems, because a man can get used to anything, after all.
oooOOOooo
He was born twice, once thrust into light and sound and if he thought at that moment it was only an infant's needs, the wide-eyed innocence of a newborn confronted at the first instant with a hostile world it cannot comprehend.
The second birth was quiet, somehow anticlimactic, a transformation, a changing, like struggling to a new plane of existence to find man has not evolved, but fallen.
In truth, at the last, he no longer remembered either.
oooOOOooo
There never was any happy ending. He never was saved. It was always meant to be that way because dreams are dreams and life is life and anything else would only be wrong.
He didn't die for nothing, it seems. He saved lives, rescued many people, and for all the destruction it caused the creature never killed anyone. Even if he never realized the good he did, never saw it buried beneath the fear of the evil he could do, the creature was never truly a monster.
And in the end he died as he once was, a human being, a man, and not a creature.
It almost made it worthwhile.
Almost.