Drop in the ocean, fall in the river
This was the someone I never knew.
There were only two formal but friendly phone calls, if that. A couple of back and forth email diversions. Pleasant. Nothing more, nothing less. Three years ago, half an age here, almost an entire lifetime over there.
No more words came after, because there was no need for any further communication. A business transaction of sorts had been completed. A project signed, sealed and delivered. All that remained were occasional glimpses of a troubled life continued somewhere else, in a different sphere. That’s all. The sum total. Message ends.
In truth, I would have thought no more of someone who was just a face on a page and a one-time, two-time name in an inbox if those same occasional glimpses hadn’t turned into a sudden unwelcome rush of ghastly and aghast turbulence via a few, all too few words. Lost for words on this screen. You have mail. Today’s silver-grey light sucks me in and won’t let me leave until I have finished trying to comprehend. Trying to understand. The how and the why and the where and the what for and, oh, the waste. What a fucking, fucking waste. I can’t do this, it seems. I fail to comprehend. I fail to understand. And so this silver-grey light will see me into dusk and into darker thoughts that I know will only dissipate in troubled sleep.
I am selfish, self-centred, a self who is too much inside myself. I try not to keep going there. I try to stop thinking how, in another time and place and moment of both decisiveness and indecision, it could have been me. Could have all too easily been me. Vertigo would have kicked in, wouldn’t it? Please tell me that vertigo would have kicked in, kicked me out of there and kicked some sense into a frantic, fraying frame.
I wonder what went through your mind — this mind that I barely knew in anything but the most formal of surroundings and as a fleeting, unmet acquaintance — as you took that final, fatal step into dead air and felt the world rush by too fast. Too fast. Did you mentally stop halfway, even as your physicality rushed past and hurtled downwards, to wonder what you were doing, what it all meant, whether this was what you wanted? Did you look for a foothold, stretch for a hand to hold, scream for a stranglehold? I somehow hope that all those ultimate questions were answered in your dying moments, before the mind caught up with your body and came together in that last jigsaw piece of forever. I hope. Somehow.
Sleep well. I hope what you chose is better by far,
and that this life no longer stings wherever you are.Silently I shake my fist and silently I bite my tongue,
as I curse such unfairness for one so young.