Mistakes
How did it go so wrong?
How did it go so wrong?
Naomi was called Anna. Not Lily. And Anna is dead. They both are.
But she wasn’t supposed to die. She isn’t supposed to be dead. This whole thing was to save her from The Brute, now a humanised Nick. But I was foolish.
Blinded as I was, I had to meddle. I was blind to the fact I was blind. Ignorant. I knew that I could cause him to die, but I could never control how. Fate, in another of its cruel movements made her the cause for his death. He killed himself, but it took the guilt from beating his own sister to death to push him over the edge.
But the blood is on my hands. I made the call. I spoke the words. And through it all, I was prepared to live with killing a Brute to save Anna from her suffering, but never for a moment was prepared for the possibility of bringing her death.
She didn’t deserve this.
Toying with something I didn’t understand – how could I be so stupid? So blind?
It was a risk I should have never taken. But how can you take a risk you never considered or even knew existed? I didn’t know! God damn it! I didn’t know!
I was so blind! So caught up in my own theories of how this circumstance of mine could work to my own goals that I had never considered the means of the means to the end I wrote.
How could I get it so wrong?
I never get it wrong!
For all my theories, I wasn’t even close. Years and years were spent watching others, speculating their stories and watching their behaviour – twisting it against them. As much as I shunned stereotypes and boasted my ability to see something deeper, I got drawn into the very vaccum of generalised assumption that I so passionately despised. Those years, which I thought had imbued me with an immeasurable ability for insight and empathy, did nothing more than render me an ignorant fool; more so than those I observed on a daily basis.
She was his sister. I had never considered it. They were a man and a woman of comparable age living together. He tried to fondle her. Oh God. She didn’t just push him away because he was drugged up or because she wasn’t in the mood. She pushed him away because she was his sister. I had attributed her gently pushing him away as a mark of regularity, never imagining what that meant. He hit her and, in all likeliness, did much worse.
Given all that has happened, here I am jumping to conclusions once more. But I can’t help it – it’s how I think.
Strangely, this tragedy finally makes sense. He wasn’t completely delusional when I had called him. He was talking sense, I was just too blind, too caught up in my own theories, to see it. ‘Lily’ wasn’t a drunken reference to Anna. Lily was his ex.
Anna’s sad tale finally came into view. She cared for him. He abused her. He did it again and again. Through the years she became nothing more than a mere silhouette of her former self. Her love sapped her of who she was. As such, it robbed her of her life – of who she would have become had things turned out any differently. I suspect that she knew what she was choosing. If not at the very beginning, then eventually. But she knew. Yet she never left him. The limitless love I tied it to was the wrong kind of love. She would’ve left an abusive husband, but she would never abandon her suffering brother.
Suffering brother. He did suffer. He suffered differently, but he suffered none the less. The powers that be tore his life to shreds before he could get an opportunity to object. He got swept away by the world around him, and couldn’t stay afloat. He fell to his knees before his circumstance. More and more I see myself in him. My obsession with Anna/Naomi, my preoccupation with her suffering had blinded me to his. It was so fucking ignorant of me. I couldn’t ever comprehend the concept of the two of them suffering, let alone consider it. I was so caught up with ‘one monster, one victim.’
I had it the wrong way around.
‘One monster, two victims.’
Me, and the two of them.
It only dawns on me now the tragic irony of my acts and the things I have said.
I could end her suffering.
I did.
Perhaps I have saved two from their suffering.
I did.
But I never intended for it to all happen this way.
Good intentions. That’s all they ever were. A dream. Perhaps, with an undertone of malice.
Whatever this force of fate is, it does not care for my intentions. There is action, and there is consequence, and then there are the consequences in between.
It was foolish to think that any of those intentions could be realised.
In a confession to myself a few nights back, I professed that
I am a monster.
There is no statement more true to me today.
It was beauty killed the beast.
- Carl Denham
