We were trucking down life’s highway when we collided, our fenders melding together. We waited ages for a tow truck that betrayed us, delivering our compromised carcasses to a junkyard, where we rusted and corroded, while passing off silly lies in a feeble attempt to protect our dignity.
“It’s not so bad here,” we honked, ignoring the approaching wrecking crew.
Milliseconds before we were demolished, I composed my memoirs, aptly titled “Obscenities, Absurdities and Senilities,” in testament to a life so bereft that I felt compelled to concoct imaginary events. In view of my abysmal trajectory, please spare me the empty sound of your hands clapping as I recount a few among the many death fantasies in which I have engaged.
1.) I wield a machete through a dense jungle when a snake wraps itself insidiously around my calves, sinking its fangs into my flesh and releasing venom into my bloodstream. Foaming at the mouth, I pitch forward while mosquitoes feast hungrily on the remainder of my life. My one regret is that I have to die alone without you (though frankly, I’m unclear as to why I have to die at all). I must confess, though, it seems fitting. So much of life is poison that in The End (and this is), it’s only right that the dose should be fatal.
I derived such perverse pleasure in recounting this first demise that I was prompted to create more of such scenarios. So here goes…
2.) I’m flying through blazingly blue skies, en route to my honeymoon. In one singular moment, I am struck by the sheer beauty of All that Is as alarms simultaneously sound and oxygen masks fall, dangling before us.
“Help!” I shout. You turn as though to respond but no words emerge. There is something about your pale lips move soundlessly in sickened features that turns my insides.
Muffled screams emerge from the cockpit and we join in with our own, straining against our seatbelts as the aircraft explodes. Twisted metal rains down as we plummet toward the vast depths of an unnamed ocean. In that last fleeting instant before The End, we embrace in a Final Farewell.
3.) Prison bars cannot stop our love, though they have slowed it down. I am free and you are not. As perversion is what placed you in your current predicament, I try to ease your pain by bringing you care packages in which I hide naked girly pictures inside of cereal boxes. I do this more from a sense of loyalty as I frankly resent your depravity, especially when it lands me behind my own set of bars for disseminating contraband. Forgiveness allows me to forget my anger and strengthen my devotion to your cause as I ignore the ‘creep’ factor.
From within respective cell hells, we pursue each other through the shadowed realms of dreams, in which we pursue one other through narrow alleys reeking of refuse. In the cold, hard light of day, we rail at the stone-cold hearts that placed us here. My apologies, but this scene is so suffocating that I am obliged to exit, before The End can be acted out to its grand finale.
4.) The wind permeates the nunnery’s cloistered walls and I shiver before retreating to the dungeon where blood oozes from stone, which I take as affirmation that one day we will be reunited. In the moldering damp, I chant to our love as I scrub filthy stains from my habit.
The day comes when, thankfully, I cross the sacred threshold leading to the Divine. Spattered with the blood of my sins, I expect to be taken in by a benevolent being. I am therefore surprised when a blank wall rises to greet me. What lies beyond, only God can say, yet he chooses not to. By the sweat of stale sin, I entreat all that is Holy, yet silence is all that greets me as I am enveloped in darkness and desolation, which I take to be The End (but of what?).
5.) Convulsing in the throes of a deadly disease, I take comfort in your presence one bed over until your shadow is deftly removed and you are transported off in a black bag inscribed with two words: The End.
Opening my mouth to utter goodbye, I hear the croak of my own impending demise. Writhing in institutional bed sheets, I bleed onto the starched white. A gurney squeals down a cold, clinical corridor reeking of formaldehyde, and I break into a sweat, contributing my raging fever to paranoia. In the next instant, my shadow is torn from the wall and I am mercilessly stuffed into a black bag by the iron fist of an all-consuming power.
Though Love’s essence may be constant, desperation deepens with scattered ashes and buried bones.
And now, my friend, I have lost you somewhere out there in the multiverse of many dreams. I sit here waiting, sure that I have failed a lesson on insignificance of monumental proportions, which marks the end of our lives, or our Love, which equals the same thing.
You have disappeared from my orbit only to repeat yourself throughout infinite cycles of exclusionary patterns. If you can read my brainwaves from wherever you are, then you know that I am still here waiting, and I am still here waiting, and I am still here waiting with my modified list of Things Gone Wrong, which I’ve expanded to include Your Absence. The hollow beating of my empty heart casts a shadow that haunts the passage of whatever remaining time I have to grieve–Tick tock.
This concludes the saga of trucking down life’s lonely highway – where Love remains forever – regardless of circumstantial evidence of the contrary.
Sayonara.