Delusion
I hadn’t the heart to write yesterday.
I placed my fingertips onto the keyboard and froze.
I screamed. I couldn’t do anything else.
What had I been thinking the day before?
Yesterday, I took the train to outside Angela’s building. I was convincing myself that I had no reason to go, that she had probably thrown the letter away in disgust and a paniced state of disarray. Either way, I had to know what her response to it was – even if it was nothing. I had to know.
As I turned the corner towards her place, I saw it was wrapped up in blue and white tape, guarded by police vehicles. Officers walked up and down the drive, keeping a few disparate passers by and crowding residents at bay. Had she misconstrued my letter, called the cops in fear for her safety?
Stupid. Stupid. How could I have allowed myself to become so exposed?
Something was wrong. Why the police tape? As I approached closer, I noticed two ambulances a bit further up the drive.
My stomach went cold. The rest of me followed suit. I began to tremble.
I once said the worst case scenario was that I’m crazy.
Oh God. Where is she?
I’m unable to comment madam.
What’s happening?
That girl in flat two.
Nor-
Yeah. It’s funny, I always said to her that her loud music would be the death of me.
Wha-? I don’t get what you mean.
That radio thing fell into her bath. Or so Jacob told me.
That’s nothing to joke about Pam.
I know.
Yesterday, it ceased to be a scenario.
Angela is dead and my letter is the cause. I am the cause. She might have died anyway, but Raymond, Jeanine, the motel owner and that dog whisper in my ear otherwise.
Her short hair will no longer waiver in the wind, the trains will miss her company and those stairs at the station will await her arrival – but wait an eternity too long. She’ll never walk down them again. The world will never know who she could’ve been: one world’s answer or one man’s dream, the writer of a napkin poem that blooms for a moment before finding a crumpled waste-bin end, the mother of a child who would’ve loved and changed the life of another. An entire bloodline in time severed and bled over a bathroom floor.
The world will never know who she might have been – because I couldn’t stand not knowing who she was.
My curiousity robbed the world of her.
I don’t know how to feel. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. But I feel it anyway. The word ‘murderer‘ is whispered in my ears constantly, a perpetual cold takes me. My heart has a knife through it and my lungs feel filled with the electrified water that killed her. My conscience is taking its revenge.
It’s showing mercy I don’t deserve.
But this isn’t the first time this has happened. However, every other time – I was unaware of the effect I had on people. I didn’t know what would happen. In that sense, I held some form of innocence. I was shocked, I was horrified.
I felt guilty.
I’m still shocked. Horrified too.
But this time, I am guilty.
Her blood is on fate’s hands, but it may as well have been mine. Fate was just the assassin, the middle man, the gun for hire; armed with a radio and bathwater. I signed the order – but under the influence of some substance.
What was it? Had my obsession robbed me of my sense and senses? The video I took in some vain hope of a lost form of companionship is proof enough of that. Had I forgotten my responsibility of realising and being cautious with my potentially dangerous actions? In light of my obsession for her, I’d say so.
Perhaps I spent so long denying the reality of my situation that I truly believed what I was saying.
A man carrying a gun can keep telling himself he’s not carrying it. That doesn’t mean it’ll disappear from his hand entirely. Should he reach out and try to grasp something, it will fire.
I thought I was deluded. In that sense, I really was.
As I walked away, fate threw me a lightning bolt of the bittersweet. At the point where it struck, lay a crumpled ball of paper. Someone had found it lying around, regarded it as garbage and thrown it onto the pavement. As curiousity and a suspicious hope unravelled it, I could only ask myself one thing:
How could such a thing be discarded?
Nora.
Her name was Nora.
I couldn’t comprehend what she had written. I could understand it, but I couldn’t comprehend its meaning. In a way, it still perplexes me.
She knew I was watching her that day. She must have seen me. Yet she continued to walk. She didn’t run, or react, or confront me. Why?
Why?
What kind of person would (not) react this way?
Right now, I imagine (and somehow hope) it means that she found me interesting. Perhaps she felt complimented. Perhaps she understood the beauty of being an observer of life. Perhaps she had a stalker fetish – but I cannot bring myself to believe that.
In a way, Angela isn’t dead. Nora might be. But Angela isn’t. She calls herself Nora, I call her Angela. I see no difference. She may be gone, but to me she was always ‘a possibility.’
‘A maybe.’
An Idea.
As an idea, she breathed one last time after her heart surrendered. In doing so, she kept the idea of her alive in my mind.
It was the idea of her that I was am in love with.
I am fortunate in that sense, that the person I love still lives.
She’ll never die – save for the moment I do.
Fate might hate me. That much I don’t doubt.
I had a chance. But discovering that chance meant losing it. If I had never asked, I would’ve still had that chance, but would have never known to act on it. I want to act on it. But that chance has long passed.
That avenue of fate never existed for me.
But perhaps it is better it didn’t.
Shocked, horrified and guilty as I may be; I’d like to think what happened happened for a reason.
I thought that Angela would never be to me, who she is.
I thought I was stupid for thinking there was a chance, a hope.
I thought I was deluded.
In that sense, I really was.
Nora told me, with a final flurry of ink:
There is no delusion.
Fate: Countless
Jeremy: One- The Score
