final act

The day you died I didn't cry.

People were shocked. Nobody expected it from you - you were always full of cheer and loud infectious laughter. But I knew better. Sure, you kept up your radiant exterior, groomed and scrutinised it in front of the mirror; but your soul was a black hole, a growing mass of darkness, and I knew suicide was the only way you would go. Couldn't imagine you dying any other way. You shot yourself in the head - finally gave in. No long letter to loved ones or notes of thanks to friends; only a short post that said something about the actor taking his final bow.

That's how it had always been. A one-man show, no co-hosts, no audience participation. You refused help because that's the kind of steely independence you forced on yourself the day you realised that's all there would really ever be. But I don't think you ever accepted that, that we are all fundamentally alone, because if you did you wouldn't be bitter about it. You had been acting for as long as you could remember. You decided one day that the world was a play, and no one really wanted the truth, so you played along. You had to retire someday. (Of course you had to shoot yourself - you had to go out with a bang.) There was no other way to cope with that massive black hole, sucking everything into its path and crushing it to bits under your oppressive tyrannic philosophy that everything was a lie.

I tried pulling you out of it many times. Sat with you and pleaded and cried and wrote long letters. But you wouldn't budge. I was merely unenlightened, happily naïve, and you had built a fort to protect yourself against anyone who tried to convince you that we weren't all lonely. Your loneliness made you completely self-centered - if no one was there for you no one should matter. And what is one man worth? How much can one man hold? You looked only to yourself, a microcosm that refused to collide or share, and you would obviously run out of yourself someday. We feed on other people and feed them too. You cut yourself off from the social ecosystem, from the web of life, and of course humans can't survive on their own.

I gave up the day I realised nothing I say would convince you. It came as a relief to you, too; I had gotten annoying. So I left you to harvest the black hole until it devoured all of you. I wrote you a eulogy (a pleasant one - funerals aren't for the dead they're for the living) but the real message, the final long letter, i slipped into your grave. It would not have been right to cry.





(i'm sorry this is a bad piece very disjointed and just not good i took a few hours to write it because 90% of the time i was distracted by facebook sigh)
('final act' is a pretty damn good title though. don't you agree. like, act. heh)