Lost
This will be the last you hear from me.
I know full well what I am doing. I have thought it through.
I could be wrong. But I no longer have the luxury of hope.
One thing has been made undeniably clear by the events of the past few weeks. Whatever it is that has happened to me, whatever it is that I can do and whatever happens with every word I speak - cannot be controlled. It seems very much an unyielding force of the world that acts through me. I have tried. I have failed. The consequences for failure have been such that I cannot accept, but must live with. I have suffered through its discovery, but I will not overstate the extent to which I have suffered. Others have suffered more. Much more. But others are stronger than I am - stronger than I had thought I was.
The starker reality of this situation is that I cannot control myself. Nora, Anna and Nick are proof enough of this. With complete disregard for what I knew the aftermath of my actions would be, I pressed on. Through Nora I thought I had found a fountain of hope, a means for rebirth. But that never came to be. The dreams I had of Anna had come to fruition. But the figure who stood above her, while carrying the face of Nick, was truly a mask for my influence. I was the nightmare with chains clutched in my hands. Had I acted different, had I not acted at all – they would still be among us. Their lives? I cannot say how they would have turned out.
But they would still be among us.
There is regret. I am not so devoid of humanity to be without it. Whether I knew their names or not, whether I knew them intimately or only spoke to them that once – I would appologise to each if they could yet listen. I’ve said few things of late. Sorry was never one of them. However monstrous Nick was, however heartless Raymond was, however annoying that dog was – none of them deseved what I had done to them, intentionally or otherwise. Nora – the mystery that she was – was taken away, never to become more than a memory. Anna deserved so much more than to die at the hands of the very person she loved most, with their blind, heartless malice as the last thing she would ever see.
I’m sorry. No thought of mine has been more sincre.
I truly am sorry.
For that reason, I am gone.
The bags that I packed, I have left behind. It all sits in the living room floor along with the photo of me that I have left behind for dad. Every last dollar. Every last possession.
Save for one photograph.
I’ve left it all to him along with whatever answers this blog can provide.
That house can no longer be called my home. No place can ever be. With some extent of realisation, what I have accomplished beyond the shadow of a doubt is to ensure that I can have no home. To find one would mean to risk the futures of those who entrust it to me and of those whom I will encounter as a result of it.
I refuse to threaten all they have.
For me, there can be no normality – no normal life.
Yet, it is the life that I have come to mourn and long for these past few weeks.
After all this time, yesterday, I finally read over all that I have written here.
Immediately, I saw the strange irony in the only lie I have told. A lie born for no reason other than to remain unknown. But a lie that took on a life of meaning, a life of its own. Having professed to changing the names and places I would write about, in reality I have only ever changed one.
My own.
The more I read, the more it became clear that to use my real name would have not been truthful. With each entry, the remnants of who I was began to fade away. Each action wrote me a new identity, a new face, a new soul. A person defines everything about who they are save for their name. I became Jeremy, a name that now holds more truth and reality than my former. The two lived different lives. They were different people. The face of the past slowly faded away. He is now but a faint whisper in the wind. To use his name would be a forgery.
Jeremy Lost who he was.
When you rob a person of their voice, you rob them of who they are.
There is not much left of who I was.
Soon there will be nothing. Nothing of me. Nothing of who Irene thought me to be.
She had always spoken about ‘never letting it win.’ She believed in being in control of her own life, the twists and turns it took and the end upon which it would arrive. She detested the idea of decay, of withering away and being remembered in her last breath as a manifestation of suffering – far from who she really was.
Irene would not be a victim of fate and allow it to destroy what was left of her.
Neither will I.
The swings will be my tree.
If who I am is to become nothing more than a distant memory, I would have both the world and myself remember me as who I once was and who I am. Not as who I will one day become.
I am indeed a monster. I would become more so and less than I am.
But today, I hold on to who I am.
Today, I choose to stop a monster.
I can be content with that.
Because in the end, there will be nothing.
Nothing but what I choose.
Nothing but a wish to be free of who I have become.
A moment to be as I once was.
A photograph held gently in a twilight grasp.
A final memory of her.
