“I’m a fucking loser. A failure.”
Those were the last words out of my mouth while I still drew breath laying in that dark, decrepit alleyway. I was a farmer by trade- used to be a farmer. I hated every moment of it. I took to the bottle a few years ago, threw everything away. I just drove away and left everything in the rearview mirror on a frosty Monday night. I had fantasized about it for decades, and was surprised at how easy it was to walk away from it all.
My wife and kids struggled to run the farm without me. They called in every favor they had but it wasn’t enough. The bank took the farm. My family was forced out onto the street to beg for their next meal.
Me? I wasn’t doing much better. My car broke down in Gardenwood. A shithole of a town in the backwoods of Colorado. I did some hard time for armed robbery. I was in and out of prison for much of the remainder of my life. I did what I had to. Three square meals a day beats starving to death in the cold.
I died with a bottle in my hand right outside Ridgeway’s Bar & Grill. Snow blanketed my body as I laid lifelessly on my side. It took two days for the authorities to find my body.
That wasn’t the end of my suffering. I never bought into all that shit about a life after death. And I am proof it doesn’t exist. I’m not alive, I just. Am. I can feel the difference.
This morning I looked into the mirror and instead of hating what I saw, I just stared blankly. I stared into an endless void searching for any bit of self-loathing, any emotion really. I just wanted to feel again. I wanted to feel shitty. I deserve to feel shitty. I thought I would suffer but death isn’t justice, it just is. It’s the absence of suffering. The absence of everything.
I wake up in the bathroom of Ridgeway’ Bar & Grill everyday to the sound of the owner locking up for the night. I’m not sure if I am trapped here, I’ve never tried to escape. All this time to think back on my life. To think about what I’ve done. And what could have been. But I don’t care. That’s the worst part. I can’t feel anything and it is slowly eroding away at my humanity.
It’s been seven days, but it feels like centuries. I am beginning to think that hell does exist and I am it’s sole occupant.
Being left alone with my thoughts. It’s not justice by any means. It’s just cruel.
Atomic Scribbles 