Vantage
By J.L. Moultrie
How could he not be upset? Encased in the fragile walls of his body, he wondered when its tenuous nature would finally betray him. His imagination bequeathed ideations that were as bitter and ephemeral as grapefruit.
He crossed the street, looking abstractly, at the distant cars and passersby. The gorge between his and their experiences held many skeletons and shallow graves, but that wasn’t the impression he got from reading her letters. – she was different, worthy.
He made his way down Woodward, books in hand, hoping that no one saw the valleys and peaks in the mask he wore so deftly. In her last letter, she told him that her father had committed suicide. She said she hated it when people said, “I’m sorry,” after she told them. That was months ago. He wondered what she was up to now.
He considered it a sign of weakness – suicide that is. How could a man abandon his daughter, his family, so selfishly?! It filled him with genuine anger and frustration. It made his thoughts run as errant and helpless as a drunk driver behind the wheel. He told her this in his last letter.
Everyone he passed seemed entrenched in realities as buoyant and terse as the demeanor of his own father. I won’t be anything like him, he wrote in his last letter. But that was more of a supplication than proclamation. Secretly and fervently, bravado shielded his ego from the brutal elements of self-interrogation and self-examination.
He stopped at an intersection, stretched and yawned - the sky looked like a gaping, majestic wound. When would it heal?
The night before, the mundanities of existence sent him reeling. The combination of the searing asphalt and his genetic inheritances placed a pistol in his hand, nearly derailing his existence.
His mother had always been against guns, since he was a kid, but that didn’t stop his older brother from bringing one in the house. His then seven-year-old eyes gazed upon the .38 glinting under the fluorescent lights with reverence and fear.
Holding the pistol last night had elicited a strange power, but that force had then turned against himself. In is bedroom, he placed the pistol in his mouth, tasting the chilly metal against the softness of his tongue. The idea of departure and finality had enticed him, but the thought of his mother finding him was frightening.
Although he was not of legal age, he drank at parties, and hooked up with reckless abandon. He didn’t put any of this in his letters. She doesn’t need to know everything, he thought.
He made it to the corner of Woodward and Warren. University students of all colors walked past and alongside him, it seemed like they were levitating.
He placed the thick envelope in the postal drop box and disappeared into the swollen crowd. The sun was high and bright.
THE END