Many times I have asked myself why things have to end. I guess it's because we change, and nothing else changes the same way each one of us do. Or perhaps it's just the way we are made, our brain getting tired of the sameness. Many things end because we let them: lunch with someone we like, because we have to work; a week-end away, in a small and cozy place, for the same reason. We leave people we love and we're not exactly sure why. We refuse eating a second ice-cream cone for fear of getting fat—often, even the first cone—, and we spend our money in needs which we only think we have, instead of spending in things which actually give us pleasure. We just don't let things be.
“To everything there is an end.”
My grandmother often said that. I can hear her voice, as if she were here, as I write these words. “No, there's no end to numbers,” I argued with her when I first learned that numbers are infinite.
“Yes, there is. Because you can't live forever to count them all.”
“Would you want to live forever?” Athena asked me once.
“Only in a world without assholes,” I answered.
“Only pussies?”
I laughed.
“Yes, and writers and words.”
“As if you were any better than them, Marquis.”
Yes, as if I, or her, or anyone walking down the street were any better.
As I said, we talked much about writing, and it wasn't only once that we discussed endings. “I hate stories which are left open. Kill the main character! It's better than not having him say yes or no.”
One of the last conversations I had with her was about writing.
“I think I'll stop writing, Athena.”
She turned to me, surprised. “But why?”
“I don't like the things I've been writing, lately.”
“Trust me, they are good. I wouldn't lie.”
I grinned very lightly.
“I haven't sent them to you. But it's not whether they're good or bad.”
“Then, why?” I like Athena's voice. It's soft, feminine, it caresses you like a soft hand.
“They are too sad. Too real.”
“Like in... bondage?”
I couldn't help but laugh. She was puzzled.
“No. Like in life. Memories. The present, the future. Even fictional stories. They are killing me. I'm spending nights up, writing things so sad that I sometimes cry, and then I look out and it's morning, the sun is rising, and I have to go to work. I work like a zombie. I fall asleep in my office, and only notice because the phone rings, someone enters, the computer makes a noise every now and them because I set it to. But I'm writing. All this time, when I'm talking to people, when I'm at one of those endless boring meetings that seem to be all I do, when I'm riding the elevator up and down, when I commute to work and back home, I'm writing, storing everything on my head to type it down later. I'm either asleep or writing. The only peace I have is when I'm with you, when the sex makes me forget the world, when I see you on top of me with that delightful smile you have, your breasts rocking up and down, hypnotically, your hands against my chest, your pretty hair, the noises you make, those lovely moans and the heaving, and the flesh to flesh sounds, this is what frees me for a few minutes and gives me strength to keep going. But after I leave that door, dead tired from the sex, the insomnia and the job I hate, it's like I'm Atlas again, and I'm writing in my mind, more stories, my biography, past and future, and so much... I feel I'm spinning faster and faster, and that at some point I'll snap.”
I paused, thinking for a long moment before continuing
“And the more I write, the less I seem to find anything in it. The readers become rare and gone, my stories get more and more different, standing from the crowd just for being unlike the others. Maybe there's a reader enjoying them, and I always think of this guy. I picture him, reading alone in a dark Saturday afternoon, enjoying the quietness of his home. But what's the point? The sequence of stories? I can invent hundreds of them, different plots, different characters, but they all seem the same to me. Rip the pages of a book and throw them into the air, they'll fall onto the floor, all unique, but all just the same for anyone looking at the scene.
“I'm making both life and writing one and the same, and they're both going in the wrong direction.”
That day Athena tried to console me, but I don't remember what she said. I wasn't listening. I left the Place and didn't go back to work.
I started this story talking about photography. Pictures save forever that unique moment which will never come back. We hold them in our hands and see people who are gone, still young and ignorant of the things to come. All the possibilities still open, and yet not knowing the tragedies that would befall upon them days later, months later.
Despite what Athena said about my non-linear writing, there is a system to it. I join the pieces not ordered by color, but trying to form a mosaic that is only seen as you move away.
It was a cloudy day, and we were at the Place, looking through the window. It wasn't much after I told her I wasn't going to write anymore, perhaps a couple weeks, or less. Athena was behind me, still in bed.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Outside,” I answered. “It's a sad place to live.”
“Life can't be like this.”
“What we have? Good?”
“No, I didn't mean that,” she said, coming to the window. “Just... we have things to do. This is... a fantasy.”
“A fantasy,” I repeated.
“Yes. You ask too many questions,” she said. “You are always looking for a meaning, for a solution.”
“And nobody else is.”
“I guess not.”
“We're both wrong,” I said.
“There's no right and wrong in this.”
“You know those insipid stroke stories?” I asked, and she nodded. “That's asking no questions. This, what we have here, this is asking questions.”
“I'm not Athena. You're not the Marquis de Poiuy. We don't even know who we are.”
“You're wrong. This is who we really are.”
“I think I have made you too romantic.”
She kissed me, and walked back to bed.
“No. This is how it should be.” I turned myself, to face her. “This is. Athena, stay with me. Let's live, together, being happy. We're unhappy, all the time, except when we are together.”
“You can't be serious. What we have doesn't exist.”
“It does.”
“No, it is a fiction. We wouldn't be like this if we were together all the time. Then there would be bills, and obligations, and problems, and all those things.”
“We can make ourselves a new life. Come with me.”
“No. I can't leave my life like that.”
“You can. You want to, or you wouldn't be thinking about it. We can trace a new life for ourselves. We can move away.”
“Don't be romantic. I'm twenty-three and I don't buy that. You can't be serious and think that it's possible to find this idyllic life you say.”
I don't want to repeat the entire argument, it's just too painful. I told her I loved her, she said I didn't, I just wanted to. We argued, shouted, cried. You can fill the blanks.
“I'll do it, anyway,” I said, as she readied herself to leave. “I'll quit my job. I'll go away, move to quiet place, away from this mad jungle of concrete. I'll go and I wish you came with me.”
Those were harsh days. I didn't want to bring the subject in an email, and I couldn't find her otherwise. I waited the next days, making plans, finding where to move. When I entered the Place, it was empty. I waited, but she never came.
I wrote her. She didn't answer.
I went back again, in our usual days. She didn't come in neither of our next two appointments. On the third, I waited thinking she would never come again and just when I was about to leave, she arrived.
“You came.”
“I can't go, Marquis. I just can't.”
“Why?”
“I can't leave everything.”
“Leave what? A husband who is absent most of the time? A marriage that doesn't exist?”
“I... can't face the unknown...”
Funny. We prefer to travel the same old hard and broken road than to wander around trying to find a shorter and nicer one.
My dear readers, you may have noticed that this story is coming to its end. It's not nice of me, stylistically, to state that, I know. But there's a difference between life and writing a story: a good story writes itself, while life needs constant pushes and nudges.
We are all suckers for a happy ending. I don't deny it, I don't fight it; I myself feel deceived when I read a novel and good guy and good girl don't get together at the end, even more if it's a movie. We all root for them. Dramas are all right and Russian plays have their place, but a happy ending is what puts a smile on the readers' face. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but by now you must know that this story won't have one.
Yet, to the minimum pleasure of your readers who followed this story up to this point, Athena doesn't die, I don't die, and there's no deus ex machina to join us, mercifully, because that's even worse than a sad ending. But things are as they are; without further ado, and as bluntly as I can put it: Athena didn't come with me.
She didn't leave her comfortable, though empty and unhappy life to live with me, nor followed me like Mrs. Robinson's daughter (who'd remember her name) to the uncomfortable silence of “what now.” She said no, repeating it in a confusing two-page long email, which doesn't make much sense, but I can summarize and interpret it as “sorry, won't change my life for you, but I did really like our time together, only it can't go on like it was anymore.” I won't delve into it anymore, for there's not much else to say. It was a blow, but I didn't really expect her to come. People hardly ever do that in real life, much less when they have a brain and are more than twenty years old.
Then, some weeks later, I fell ill. They couldn't find anything wrong with me (“stress,” that's what the doctors said in a few hundred more words and dollars), except some “minor anomalies”, but I felt awful and thought I was going to die. It was not depression. It was physical; pain on my limbs, my heart feeling tired, out of breath, constant weariness, headaches. I was given two weeks off work, and now here I am.
I'm really thinking about changing my life. It's not easy to change your life, it's like parachuting. You have to jump, close your eyes and leave the safe plane behind, and sometimes your parachute may not be the first-class-will-never-fail equipment you'd like to have strapped to your back. There's also the constant problem of money, and so on. I'm looking for alternatives.
They offered me a better position at the office. Good conditions, except for quality of life, of course. I thought of taking it when I was offered, just before I left for these vacations (if I can call them that). I won't write anymore, anyway, and I won't have Athena. Who really wants a life? Nobody, or we just wouldn't wear ties.
But I used these days off work to come to the countryside. I think I could open a small shop in this touristic town, selling useless stuff for five or six times its actual value. I'm looking for a place to rent tomorrow. I liked to work on clay when I was a kid, making small people and animals and cities. Perhaps I could do that again.
You know, the details.
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Copyright Antheros (c) 2008. All rights to this story are reserved.