Echoes

There are times when it feels like everything has been said, the tale told in full, and there is nothing left to do but wait for the end. Just words on a page, stripped of the urgent immediacy of the now, empty symbols on a paper that yellows and fades with time. A persistence of vision, perhaps, but only for a time, and in truth only really meaningful to the man who wrote the story. But when the man passes, so does his tale, leaving behind nothing but a kind of voyeuristic show-and-tell that, like its narrator, is doomed to be consumed by the darkness. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, or so the liturgy goes, and all things that begin must eventually, inevitably, end. Never, like forever, is a long time, but the good news is that you won't be there to see it.

One man's tragedy is another man's comedy, a journey from the base to the sublime. It's only a tragedy when it happens to you, when you are the one who has spent a lifetime travelling through the blood and wreckage of other peoples' lives in search of redemption for the blood and wreckage of your own. But the blood on your hands reminds you, with a damnation that can not be denied, that you can't expiate your own guilt by trying to correct the mistakes of others. God forgives but you don't, most certainly not yourself, but where else can redemption come from? In the end, it is all nothing but an illusion, waiting on the yawning emptiness to put an end to the voice that whispers in the back of your mind, the memories reminding you of just who and what you are.

Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs, what can you do when there are no more wars to fight but refight those wars? The story always ends the same way but, in truth, you never felt more alive than when the battle raged, when your life balanced on the knife-edge of Fate. Everything else is just a terrible ennui, bereft of the startling clarity induced by your own imminent mortality, even as you would futilely deny that mortality. Echoes of sound and fury, a morality play that somehow lost its morality as you drifted from disaster to disaster and pretended you were master of your own destiny.

There is no comfort, no haven in her arms, no refuge in which to hide from yourself. You look in her eyes and see a reflection of yourself, but it's a twisted vision, incomplete, for she can see only what you allow her to see. You can't lie to the dead, it's impolite, and they are beyond your lies anyway for they know the truth of what you are. But the dead don't judge, they just bear witness and leave you to judge yourself.

Echoes of the past, the memories give you meaning but, when you are gone, perversely lose that meaning and become nothing more than a forgotten curiousity. They can have no meaning without the person who created them, and perhaps they are, after all, best forgotten. There can be nothing more to say necause it has all, indeed, been said, been done, and there is nothing left to do but put it all down on the page as a testimony to what was.