Staying Stuck

Driving can be therapeutic. He's driving and something he's been hiding from pushes against him. It feels like it rises up into his chest through the driver’s seat backrest and punches a hole in his heart. 

He hasn't been honest with himself.

He’s lied to himself for many years about some of his motivations. Lied about what he really gains from his relationships, but especially those intimate connections with women. He has always haphazardly believed they haven't been a waste of time. Suddenly he realises that this is actually true: no connection with another human being is wasted, and nor is it a happenstance, or a coincidence. But there’s more to it than that.

It's late afternoon and an unusually energetic winter sun hangs low over a horizon that persists in giving the impression that it has pull in the world. Certainly something is pulling at him. 

The tug is a question: Why do I persist in keeping connections? 

And a second raises its curly question mark: What do I gain from it?

Like a ray of the setting sunlight, the answer glares at him from below the visor.

I get the benefit of not having to face the truth: that I hang on because I’m afraid to let myself fall into the unknown. 

Letting go of the past would mean he’d have to completely accept that he is living now, not then. And if that’s true, then is a construct, a memory, multiplied many times to create the script of a fiction he has been following for years.

He stares into the gathering dusk. He senses the whoosh of passing vehicles but doesn’t hear them. Lights approach and stab past. He hears himself swear and it seems to emanate from the back of his neck. The vehicle thrusts him forward.

The logic of his answer cannot escape him. If the past is only memories, then it can’t be real. It has to be an illusion. Or at least images projected against a mist. And this mist is shifting, swirling, impermanent. Now that he’s following the logic, the next bit is even more illuminating.

Only the present is real. And even that is a construct of his own perception, his own vantage point. He realises, staggeringly, that none of his thoughts, hopes, wishes, desires that are based in the past have any hope of realisation, and hoping for it to be so is a catastrophic waste of energy. The ghost that had been shadowing him has vanished.

He senses that he has pushed open the door to another room. He walks through, and even before he comes to a standstill he knows that the door will close behind him. Yet he is startled.

The room is completely empty.