After that night, his house went dark. The parties just . . . ended. People soon forgot about the mysterious Gatsby and the marvelous parties he'd thrown every Saturday night, and moved on with their lives.
That is, until the accident.
It was all over the papers. His dead face, smooth and boyish, was plastered on the cover of every newspaper and tabloid for months. How tragic it was that he only gained a face once he was dead, and then it was besmirched by the death of others.
For Gatsby had killed a woman. Myrtle Wilson. He'd run her over with his shiny yellow car and hadn't even looked back.
And the girl in the car with him. Daisy Buchanan. Daisy, like the one on Gatsby's ring. Daisy, the girl he'd loved relentlessly, inexplicably.
And Myrtle's husband George, who'd walked up to Gatsby's house on a bright afternoon and shot him in his swimming pool, before turning the dirty gun on himself. He'd thought that Myrtle was Gatsby's mistress, and maybe she was, but I can't imagine a man who'd looked at Daisy the way he had taking a mistress or being involved with anything less than the purest form of love.
I found that I could not blame George; had had been acting out of love, or perhaps out of a memory of the love he'd once felt. But still it haunted me. The filthiness of this murderous love struck me, and I wondered how love could be noble, and why people spent their whole lives looking for it, when it made people do such terrible things.
I did not cry when I heard the news, but rather sat very still for a while with a deep, hollow ache in my chest, the newspaper crumpled in my hands. And even when I moved again, began living my inevitable life, the emptiness followed me for a long time, and my heart ceased to feel as deeply as it once had.
My heart was broken; but what was worse, my mirage had been shattered.