Luke Alden - Happy Birthday Eternity

And I sob.

I let it out.

Years of anger and frustration and whatever else I’ve kept bottled up within me, I let it out.

I think of Franklin. My parents. Alicia. Loneliness.

My thoughts race through my mind as I explore everything that I’ve gone through and everything that it has left me with.

And in the end I’m left with the realization that I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t.

I don’t know much of anything.

My head hurts.

I see Dylan getting up off the ground.

Brushing himself off.

He looks confused and he looks angry.

I tell him to leave and give me a moment with Evaline.

Then as he exits, Evaline crouches down next to me.

I see my memory of her flicker in and out.

And Evaline, the real one, the love of my life, she tells me that we have to talk.

We walk at a slow pace.

We walk as if we have all the time in the world.

And while we may have one day had time; this is no longer true.

There is an end date.

There is an end date and it causes everything else to feel that much more compressed. It causes everything else to feel that much more real.

The sun is shining.

It’s fall.

The leaves are falling.

We hold hands.

I feel her loose skin as our fingers tangle up.

This moment, it will have an end, just like everything else.

She looks at me with a smile.

‘This is nice.’

And I find myself nodding in agreement. Because it’s true. I took things like this for granted in the past.

We spend the next few minutes in silence before I open my mouth.

‘You know, Franklin almost had me convinced that you had joined some sort of southern death cult.’

I laugh as I say this.

She smiles.

‘Why southern?’

‘You know…I have no clue.’

My thoughts wander as we meander with a cadence that reflects our conversation.

Finally we start to slow.

I can see that she’s in pain.

Her eyes are at a squint and she’s becoming weak.

We sit down at a park bench.

She leans her head against my shoulder.

We take in the moment. We let ourselves breathe.

She brushes her fingers up and down my arm with a slow drag that causes my body to tingle.

And this feels right.

Like a poem.

Like a song.

She’s the verse to my chorus.

And I ask if we should have lasagna tomorrow. I ask this because I know that it’s her favorite food.

And she doesn’t answer.

She stares out toward the horizon.

Finally:

‘I’m going to die.’

I pause.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

I breathe.

‘It means I’m going to die.’

I twist my nervous fingers.

‘You mean you’re going to kill yourself?’

‘No, I’m dying.’

Then we let ourselves sit in silence.

She looks at me and I keep looking forward. Watching her out of the corner of my eye.

I feel nauseous.

I feel nauseous because I understand.

We don’t have much time left.

‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this. All I really knew was that I had to go. I had to go and I had to find something new for myself. I didn’t feel complete. I didn’t feel like a real person. Everything was dull. I was alive in the most basic sense of the word and nothing seemed to be changing that.’

We’re sitting.

We’re sitting on the curb.

Outside my old office.

The streets are dead.

The world feels quiet.

‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this and I missed you constantly. I really did, I mean, why else would I call you like I did? I wanted to talk to you and to be with you. I wanted to let you know that I was ok. But I couldn’t be with you. And hearing your voice, talking to you, it was all too much for me to handle.’

The world around us is static.

My eyes are focused on her.

I watch as she moves her hands with her words.

They move with gentle rhythms and unsure gestures.

‘I had been ready for things to change for so long, and then one day, they did change. I found Dylan passing out stupid little pamphlets on a street corner. He told me that there could be more. He told me about death. He told me that everything is supposed to die. He told me that without death, without the concept of death, we can never truly understand life. And you know what? It made sense. It was a chance meeting and it changed my life.’

The words shake with reluctance as they escape her mouth.

‘It made sense and I knew that it was the answer to all the empty feelings that I had. And at first, I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand what endings meant. But then, things changed. I met more people like Dylan. We started to pull strings. We wanted other people to understand what life really meant. We wanted people to understand that death was important to life. We wanted people to understand that endings were important because they gave everything else a meaning.’

Tears escape from her eyes.

They streak down her face.

They reflect in the light from the world around us.

‘I wanted you to understand. I kept watching you from afar. I was going to bring you in but I knew you wouldn’t have come willingly. You wouldn’t have understood. You were too oblivious.’

Her words sting with a truth that makes my guts feel hollow.

‘And Dylan, he saw that I missed you, and so we devised a way to make it look like your work was going under. There were people at the top of your old job who associated with us. They made it look like you had all worked yourselves out of jobs.’

There’s a pause.

‘We only wanted people to understand what they had in life.’

There’s a sadness in the way that she speaks.

‘I only wanted you to feel things.’

A slowness in the way that she orates.

‘I kept hoping that you’d understand things. I kept hoping that we’d figure out a way to be together. I knew that things had been shit before. I knew that. But I kept clinging on to this idea that if everything was played right, that if you finally understood what it was to be alive, if you finally understood what love was, then maybe we could work things out. I kept hoping that you would understand so that we could finally be together and so that we could start to build something that was greater than what we had before.’

And I think back to what I’ve lost.

My job.

My home.

My best friend.

My mind.

I think back to these things and I feel myself at a loss for emotion.

‘Some people were crazier than others. I was too. When I first started with these people, I knew that I was going to let myself die, I knew that much. It was what I needed in my life. It was the missing piece of the puzzle that caused everything else to make sense. And then I lost sight of everything else.’

There’s a weight in my stomach and in my feet and in my soul as I listen to the words that she speaks.

‘We started burning down buildings. We wanted things to be public; we wanted the world to understand. We were radicals with a bunch of ideas that we didn’t know how to express. And I guess part of me just wanted to do these things so we’d get noticed, so that you might start to understand what was going on. I guess I just hoped that all our insanity would be like some sort of signal to you.’

She pauses.

Looks at the ground.

‘And then you started taking those drugs. You started taking those drugs and you started seeing Alicia and I started to give up. I couldn’t take it anymore and I wanted to let go, but I also wanted to fix things.’

She looks up.

She chokes on her words and her tears and in the silence that engulfs us, she starts to shake.