29  So Here It Is: The End of Angel

“… And this is a story line
A progression from A to Z
From my depression, rape, to my issues with intimacy

”…The only shit I write
Is what spins around my head
I’d rather bite this lemon
Than let it leave me as dead...”

Sam slammed his door and stood there, leaning against it.  When he opened his mouth to say something.  But what slipped out wasn’t what he expected.  It was thunder.  It came from so far deep inside, it sounded like the earth was cracking in two.  Then the wind flew in. 

Sam picked up the computer chair.  He screamed, “That fucking asshole!”  Then he threw it at the bookshelf.  The chair smashed into the books, wiping out three rows of shelves.  Its leg snapped and somersaulted towards the floor.

All over . . . .                All over.                       Books lay crumpled, strewn ‘cross blue threaded carpet.  Shadows fell across the crinkled notes and postcards.  Everyone has a box.  But this one was a cage.                          Or a wind tunnel . . . .  It was a landscape filled with bookshelf mountains.  And bed platues.  Sam whirled around above it, as carefree and destructive as a tornado.

He’d snapped.  But he didn’t know it until he was shoving his fist into drywall.  But it didn’t matter.  He was feeling so bright, he couldn’t see anything else.  Then it wasn’t him hitting the walls anymore.  He didn’t know where he’d gone to.  He was still looking from inside his head.  But it wasn’t him outside.

Four stitches . . . .

If I told you what happened from the start, you would have never believed me.  There would have been too much why.  Too much argument.  Too much blame.  Truth is: it’s the truth that drives people insane.

If I had known Scott would have been gone so soon, I would have said it.  That’s why I’m telling you.  I’ll be gone soon, too.  Accept my sincerest apologies, if this makes me weak or lazy or stupid.  I never meant to be all of those things.

Behold!  The star-crossed lovers!  Les âmes endommagées!  The families, victims of society, revolutionaries, and all those who stood, mouths agape and unable to turn away from the terrible sequence of events unfolding before their eyes--unable to turn away--damned if they could stop those events from unraveling completely.

So here’s the ending.  Or maybe it’s the beginning.

That all depends on your perspective.

Five bodies.  One man, on death row.  Two, grieving, mothers.  Both changing the world.  Arrested in motion and burdened by condolensces.  Two parents who are looking for someone to blame.  A woman who damns herself for not helping.  One boy who tried too late.  Another who thought it was his last chance.  The widow who dies a little more everyday; clinging to life by what he never had.  The neighbor who wants to say he never saw it coming.  All the rest, who did, but could never turn away, for fear of missing the most gruesome.  And all those who were shocked into nihilistic disblief.

God bless the voyeurs.

Two impressions on the long, flattened grass, in a bird sanctuary, surrounded by a thick, white, spray-painted outline and a yellow police tape.  A once blood-soaked, ransacked apartment, now filled with another mother and father and son.  A violent divorce.  A run-away, a murderer.  Two empty bedrooms and a make-shift studio that no one will set foot in again for a very long time.  Pictures.  Boxes.  A maintanance shed, railroad tracks and a cliff.  Foot prints all over, blood, rope, unfinished business, duality.

This could have been meaningful, or at least poetic.  Could have been more or less statistical, educational, emotional.  Of course, it could have also been contrived.  I never liked pulp free, anyway.  I could have used real names.  I could have blamed it on anything.

But that would only draw you away from the fact that there are five bodies.

Distract you from the how.

Make you forget about goodbye.

All I ever wanted was a proper goodbye.

So here it is.