I was walking along a lonely road late one night in July many years ago. The night screamed with the song of wildlife, proudly declaring in error that this summer would last forever. My steps crunched on the pavement and dirt. I walked by an old home in an old town. It was built back in the centuries when many homes were actually given names. Recently, it had been carelessly allowed to fall into the hands of a man who could not protect it from himself.
Stella Manor, she was called. She was among the many homes in these towns built in the 1700s that saw entire lifetimes come and go through her doors. In that way, she was infinite. But here, tonight, her days are numbered. Miscalculation, desperation, misunderstanding, and ultimate failure to preserve what was and to protect the future all would culminate in a tragic ending.
As I passed, I heard a booming sound. Curious, I turned down the dirt driveway and peered into the back yard. It was a man much younger than me. He was dumping boxes of papers into the dumpster in the darkness. There was a gravity about what he was doing. It felt like pushing helicopters off carrier decks to lighten the load for the refugees when Saigon fell. Be this Saigon, be this Waterloo, something was happening here.
"Hey!" I called him. But he did not turn. He was not ignoring me; I was out of phase. I could not affect or intervene, even though I wanted to so badly. In the pages that he was discarding, he looked at them briefly. He had carried them across the time and space of his travels. With great sadness, he looked at the pages of his first words in 79, the 100 compositions written in February 1983, the 180 written in March of 1983, The Recital, The Concept of Me II, works that captured his youth, innocence, and beginnings. In great lots, he hefted piles of work that would be lost forever into the dumpster.
What is it that compelled this young man of only 23 to make such a sacrifice? It is clear that he is taking pieces of his very soul and throwing them from the plane. He is about to jump into a volcano; he knows that is what this is, and yet he thinks he can handle it. But the very foundation of who he is already is failing. The integrity of all he has earned over the last year is not as strong or as established as he thought. He is walking upon nothing. He is jumping from piece to piece of the wreckage of the life that he has made, thinking that there is land nearby, never realizing he is traveling with hostiles.
The diary of a teenager who failed to live in the here and now because he did not understand the complexities of his composition. All broke down into strange outbursts and serenades, falling into nothingness. No one will ever know. He could walk those streets again, smell the air of days gone by, understand things decades later, but that was denied in this moment of absolute destruction. Blatant disrespect in the name of honor that writers often choose.
Most of the time, the writer is about to die when he or she makes this terminal decision to not live beyond their physical existence. Right then and there, they play God and decide to deny the very essence that they are to those who love them in the name of privacy, but in reality, fear.
This 23-year-old was practically coveting this passage into darkness, or was he? Although he was alive, he was not in reality. Out there beyond what he had built, he found the living dead.
Words, words, more words. Beautiful words, boastful words. Shattered words, and loving words. Infatuation only just hours old. Heartbreak and betrayal. These were words that could never be written again, and he was discarding them.
"STOP!!!! You fool! You have no idea what you are doing!" He stopped. He looked up at the starry night sky. He had been here almost a year and thought he had built an empire. It seemed as though moments ago, he was under that August 88 night sky when everything was brand new and perfect. Here now, he was throwing himself away. He did not know it because everything was chaos. He could not see through the thick gloom of his life at the time.
Back at the home of a friend, his prize waited for him. Everything he thought he wanted. It was going to be perfect. All he had to do was throw as much as he could overboard to make room for this choice. Bliss, freedom, and unsuspectedly dying in a way he did not know was possible.
The weeks that have passed were wild. He broke into this life by taking a stand against treachery and betrayal. He was right, and he was done. On his first day out, he met a beautiful woman who sat and told him of a tragedy so horrific that it broke her family. She was beyond rescue. She would be fine on her own, but he could not figure out where she would land.
Was it the fact that he had been called out by his mentor? He pointed out the Freidian course that he was taking. But recognizing that would be a call to action, demanding that he change course right now. Don't run with this girl. Don't run away. Take a breath, see his life, and figure out a way to stay alive instead of running ahead of the fatal wave that was right behind him, that had already swept him away the moment he went looking for trouble. One incredible smile on the way to the gallows.
Everything had to be done with stealth, including this tragic moment. Ten years of ink and paper, most of it, treated with such disrespect. There was no turning back, there was no way out of the fall. I watched him with tears in my eyes, because here I was again, and there was nothing I could do. What was about to happen would be his inevitable swan song. This would happen in stages of release, guilt, catch, and release. The road was ahead, and it was hot, coarse, and bitter. It would burn away all of the facades and fantasy. It would leave behind the truth, and I would deny it to the bitter end.
Although I was this tragic person, dumping his very life into this dumpster, the next two months he would live an entire lifetime as if it happened all at once, and then, on the night of September 8th, he would face the end. The morning would come, September 9th, and the realities of everything he had done would fall down upon me. This night too, where he betrayed himself ultimately, and I knew that running was over. Even though I had made it almost 24 years, I was born somewhere in the stark realities that unfolded that Friday night into Saturday.
What was lost in that dumpster will never be again, and I have accepted this. It is the road that brought me here. I am who I am because of every minute and every decision. In my dreams, I have changed it a thousand times, but that is just an echo of my defiance. I walked back out of the driveway, determined to leave this memory where it lives. The young man packed up the car, knowing what he did would hurt forever. As the lights fell upon the dumpster, a cat jumped up on it as if to ask him, "What have you done?"
He was one hour from oblivion, he knew it then, and I know it now, and there was nothing either of us could do about it.
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