• THE ENDING AGAIN
    II
    By UC Poika




    It was a gray day for us all. The incident at the mall had affected us all deeply. But I was there. I was among them. When he and his girl saw us, I insulted him and they rushed away from us, not out of fear but out of anger. Then all of a sudden like, the shots rang out. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from and just hit the floor. I did not hide under his body after he was hit. He fell on me. I did not seek his corpse for safety and what would have been the harm if I had. He fell on me and I just chose to stay safe. That is all.
    I remember all the blood. I remember the screaming. And the horror of it all. You just can’t imagine what it was like. I was there and I have trouble relating to what happened. Much of it is not something you can tell anyone about in just a few words. It was terrible. And I think, it is best if I don’t even try to describe it any further. Why would you want to know a thing like that? Why would you care to look on hell, even another person’s hell? What would be the point? There is no joy in that.

    That is what I tried to do after the incident at the mall. I tried anything I could to get joy out of life, for I realized it could end at any minute. I had some success but it was meaningless. Even sex with my girlfriend—my first time incidentally—did not give me the thrill I sought. And, finally one day I gave up trying to enjoy life. I just gave up. And, after awhile I didn’t even see any need for it. Life was meaningless. He and the others were dead, and I was not. It made no sense. But there it was, staring me in the face no matter what I did.
    Well to make a long story short I began to spiral down. I broke it off with my girlfriend. I quit hanging around with guys—the same guys I was with who had insulted him in the first place. I stopped going to wrestling, and the chess club. I gave away all of my Yu-gi-oh! Cards. I retreated from my family and no longer ate with them except when forced on special occasions. I spent more and more time in my room on my computer. Then I spent my time on my computer on fewer and fewer sites, until at last I was only on gaia online all by itself. I dropped out of all the areas of gaia online too and found myself strictly limiting myself to the poetry and lyrics in the arena, always hoping to read more poetry written for or by fellow emos. But ultimately I stopped the computer altogether and took to lying on my bed staring at the ceiling for hours on end, and thinking.

    I conceived of a place no larger than my head wherein would lie all of my thoughts. My needs were few, since I got very little exercise I required very little food. Since my room was air conditioned I did not sweat much and required very little liquid. Since I did almost nothing I bathed but only because it would seem odd not to. And, I had in affect quit the so called real world as nearly as I could. The only place left to retreat from was my thoughts. But unable to fully limit my thoughts I took to sleeping as much and as long as possible.
    Ironically, I began to sleep less and less. The days got longer. The hours seemed endless. The nights unbearable. But I was awake. Against my wishes I was awake and restless. Like a caged animal I paced my room as if it were a small cage in an old fashioned circus trailer. Because of my increased exercise and constant irritation I began to be hungry. So I began sneaking out at night to get leftovers and to fill empty milk jugs with cold water and ice so that I need not come out in the day at least. And, because of the increased exercise I began to shower—also at night mostly—because I needed to and not because it would seem odd not to. But the worst part was that my mind became a thousand times more active.

    I realized I was a prisoner in my own cell, that I had by my own decision become my own jailer. But I was ashamed I had done such a thing and my shame made up my bars. I simply could not face my family, my friends, my teachers, even talking to my God was a questionable thing to do. I was so ashamed! It was as if I had shot the kid in the mall. It was as if he had been my best friend. It was as if I had pulled the trigger that had killed him and the others at the mall that day. But I had done nothing.

    “I didn’t do anything!” I yelled. “I never hurt anyone. I am not guilty!”

    But I knew I was. I was guilty of living my own feelings and having no regard for his. I was guilty of rejecting my family as surely as if I had committed suicide. I was guilty of shunning my friends, rejecting the support of my teachers, my pastor, and ultimately my God. I was in what I would have to call hell on earth and I had put myself there. And, I thought it just.
    Then the day came. I stopped taking showers. I stopped washing my clothes. I stopped shaving. I stopped everything. I no longer ate. I intentionally tried to stay awake by changing from water to coffee and soda pop. I turned up the heat in my hell. Perhaps to punish myself for punishing myself. I conceived of that idea but rejected it as a matter of semantics.

    Finally I conceived of a truth. The material world was the enemy. Those who made things sought out those traitors to intellectual thought who sold their wares no matter how little value they had for incredible sums of money in some cases by creating a need for them—which I understood to mean there was no need in for them even in the first place. Like the Internet it was all unnecessary. There was no legitimate need to be connected to people one would never in all likelihood ever meet, and even if they did meet and became friends would they not do so at the expense of real people in real life. The computers then were unnecessary, the software, the many accessories, the jobs that made them, the people who sold them and ultimately even the people who used them. It was all very irrelevant. It was all meaningless. It lacked any purpose other than to entertain those who had become a slave to entertainment and anything it brought with it. It was all very senseless.
    I pictured the great number of people, poor, deranged, lazy and disillusioned all, prisoners of the system that earned the money and built the infrastructure that housed them, social misfits and marginal individuals with no real relevance to modern materialistic society, the impoverished masses that still struggled with antiquated notions of being a productive member of society, of earning a living, of owning a house, but who in the end were ripped off by the sales industry who sold them on the idea they could afford to borrow far more than their incomes would support. Like the terrorists that bombed the Twin Towers on television on that local program—what was it called? Oh yeah—the Evening News which had become so sensational it was merely the highest rated fiction program on the tube. And, I pictured myself the savior of such poor pathetic things. For I had seen it from its proper perspective, understood it most clearly, more clearly than I ever could have conceived of seeing anything in any other light. I must, I thought, lead the masses out of this meaningless existence. But how?

    I got out of bed for the first time in days. I didn’t eat or drink. Okay, okay… after I got out of the bathroom I sat down in front of the computer and turned it on. As it loaded it went to my home page, gaia online. So, I thought, why not start there? Why not write a non-fiction story for the kids online? What a wonderful place to start! With my own peers.

    I signed in and went directly to the community button, then ran the arrow down to the arena,
    and then to writing and—accidentally—to fiction. Up popped a story with a title I just couldn’t resist,

    The Ending Again by UC Poika. Thus I read a story about how he had died.
    It tore at my heart when I realized it was not about UC Poika but about the boy that I had seen killed in the incident in the mall. He was alive. He had suffered immeasurably more than I had imagined. Even I who had insulted him last, had forgotten him, not to mention all others. I had gone to hell for what I had done. He had almost gone down to Sheol though he had done nothing. How I grieved! How I felt pain! Real pain, not just the superficial pain of the body but the real pain of existence.

    “He felt the bullet enter his head. Strange as it may seem he even felt his skull shatter and the bullet plunge deep into his brain. It was as if time almost stopped and the speed of the bullet had slowed to where it barely moved, though the affects of the projectile were unhampered.

    He felt the heat of that instrument of death before he felt any tactile sensation at all. Then he heard only the eerie silence that followed the shooting like that silence that often accompanies an automobile crash. But as he felt the warm blood run down the side of his face he also felt the cold of the marble flooring at the mall where it happened. Then it began, the sensation of cold came upon him, an ever increasing coldness that seemed to distract him from everything else, numbing his sense of reason and causing him to relinquish any desire for any further reason while in his body.

    He felt himself float from his body and that odd sensation of being aware of existence beyond the body, the cold flesh being felt from the outside and the inside of his own corpse no longer sensed at all. Then as his self-awareness slipped out of even his dissipating atoms he imagined himself a body floating above the scene, looking down on the paramedic covering his face with the sheet they had placed him on. How very awesome it all seemed. To think! This is the way it was when I died. Not when I was dying any longer, but the way it was when I died.”

    As I read the beginning I was shocked by his description of things, some of which he felt while lying on top of me as I used his corpse for a shield, a fact he hadn’t even noticed, or thought noteworthy enough to include. I was nobody to him. He had no feelings one way or the other in the end and yet I had so vainly suffered, so meaninglessly tortured myself. Was I beyond redemption? Was there any creature less deserving to be alive than I? What had happened to cause me to become so misguided, to throw away years of my life like that, to live a life best described as a living death for a boy who never even gave me nor my insult a second thought. I was alas a source of great shame.

    It was a gray day for us all, I wrote in the end. The incident at the mall had affected us all deeply. But I was there. I was among them. When he and his girl saw us I insulted him and they rushed away from us, not out of fear but out of anger. Then all of a sudden like, the shots rang out. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from and just hit the floor. I did not hide under his body after he was hit. He fell on me. I did not seek his corpse for safety and what would have been the harm if I had. He fell on me and I just chose to stay safe. That is all.


    THE ENDING AGAIN