Tales

It was only a memory to him now.

He sat alone at the edge of his new bed. He stared at the wrinkled white fabric with telltale stains that told him he was not the first to use them. There was another bed across the room with equally dirty sheets, empty and made to look as sanitary as possible. Truth be known, however, nothing in the building was sanitary. He put the soft fabric of his sheet between his thumb and forefinger. It was cold, unforgiving, and somewhat rough. How was he supposed to remain calm and happy in such an uncomfortable bed? How would he ever find the strength to sleep at night?

His name was Brian. To the best of his knowledge, he was in his early twenties, still somewhat new to the world but already embittered to it. He used to dream of love and happiness, which he knew to be closely related, but now he didn't dream; he simply waited for death like an old man in a nursing home. And maybe that's where he was now, in a nursing home, an old, confused man. He didn't question reality anymore; he'd lost the strength and drive to be curious. Life was complicated and harsh and curiosity wasn't enough of an excuse to keep him going.

"Yes," he said to himself, "That's it. I'm old and I'm in a home where I belong. That must be it."

He accepted that fate, which may or may not have been true, and he slept for the first time in days, content that he'd found a suitable reason to sleep. He knew he didn't need a reason, for he had a hard time finding reason in anything, but sleep was something he felt deserved justification. It was like lunch, where he refused to eat until somebody told him that his beloved wasn't really dead. Not quite dead, but in there somewhere, not wanting to be resuscitated.

Those damn nurses could be so harsh.

Brian didn't dream of anything specific, just an odd combination of images and senses put together in some sort of pattern of happenings that didn't make much sense. If it were anything, it reminded him of a David Lynch film. He never could tolerate those very much, so it was better that he didn't give it a second thought.

There were many people in his dreams. Some he knew and some he didn't, but he was sure that they were all connected somehow, that each was an aspect of him, dissociated by the miracles of dreams, but associated somehow with Brian's reality, a reality that he didn't much care for anymore, not since the loss of his beloved, of Madeline.

The first time he met Madeline was a hard time in his early youth. She cared for him when nobody else was willing; she was a godsend in the middle of a childhood chaos. At first their relationship was defined only by friendship, and for many years it stayed that way. Whenever living had become too much, he found his strength in her, for she was willing to let him rest while she took the pressures of his life as her own. She was an amazing girl, even at that young age, before the world turned upsidedown.

It was still a world that Brian didn't want to live in. It was violent and indifferent, a universe from some novel that existentialists would have labeled cynical. He was abused as a child, which is the simplest and clearest definition of his problems in life. And it wasn't just his parents that were doing the abusing. They had their share, of course, but even his closest friends and classmates had a tendency to be abusive. When he heard the phrase that kids can be so cruel, he half laughed, knowing that it was an understatement. He didn't care for life and his first thought of suicide came at the young age of five. He wasn't morbidly curious like most kids; he really wanted to die.

The only thing that let him hang on was Madeline. She would find him at just the right moment; she would awaken to him as he stood in front of a moving bus or was holding a razorblade to his wrist, the first droplet of blood already squeezing out. Madeline had an exquisite sense of timing. She would hold him and nurture him and tell him that he would be alright. She was the only thing that kept him alive and kept him somewhat sane. She was his saving grace.

It was inevitable that he would fall in love with her. He remembered vividly the day they lied together on a hammock in the rain. She was a secret he wasn't allowed to reveal; he never let anybody meet her or know about her. And on that day he kissed her for the first time.

He was resting his head on her breast, her hand gently caressing his arm. He looked up at her, knowing that she was stronger than he, and almost cried.

"I love you," he said simply.

Those were words that kept him awake at night; words he'd always been afraid to say. He was too fragile to simply kiss her, to let a moment sweep him up, but this simple moment, lying on a hammock in the rain, was enough to finally break him. He reached up and he kissed her. It wasn't an overtly passionate kiss, but it definitely wasn't anything less. Madeline wasn't shocked or surprised. It was as if she had been expecting it for a long time. Brian knew, instinctively if not consciously, that she had.

"I love you too," she replied just as simply.

The following moments were uncomfortably silent and awkward, and the beating of Brian's heart didn't make it any easier. He wanted to jump up and shout out of happiness, a happiness he felt far too little, but he knew he also wanted to let the moment stay forever, to rest there in Madeline's arms until the hammock deteriorated or the trees decayed. It was possibly the best moment of his life.

When he graduated high school, Brain had no ambitions for college or even for his future. He never thought much about the future; all he thought about was Madeline. He was a hopeless romantic, but not by choice. If he hadn't been, he probably would have lost the will to live long ago. He knew that love was a pinnacle of life, an achievement of monumental importance and he had found it. For all of his problems and through all of the shit of his existence, he had found love.

He didn't know much about life, of course, but he gave a lot of thought to the absurdity of humans walking across the globe, each claiming to hold some piece of the puzzle, each constantly reworking it and playing with it like putty until it made some sort of sense. He knew that love was a connection that brought some of the puzzle together, managed to put two of the pieces in relation to each other. He also knew that love was the perfect way of coping-life is a lot easier to live when you don't have to live it alone-and that living alone was what Brian feared the most.

But he also knew that he wasn't alone; he had Madeline and she wasn't ever going anywhere. There were many seditious forces at work with Brian, but Madeline was the calming factor, the rational factor, the thing that made the storm tolerable and livable. He often thought that he would propose to her.

He never really knew that much about her, though. He never once met or even talked about her family or friends. She always came to him alone, as a single person with no other connections. The only person she ever talked about was him, and the only person she was interested in thinking about was him. Her whole mission in life seemed to be for Brian to fall in love with her. She was there to offer him solace, friendship, love, and protection, like a guardian angel. She was more than he could ever want for.

There was however, a fateful day where they were caught. They were sitting in Brian's house, holding each other and kissing, like young lovers often find themselves, and his parents walked into the room, stunned. Brian tried to explain what was going on, but they refused to accept the reality of it. They even refused the very existence of Madeline. They said that she wasn't there, that there was nobody with him on the couch. Brian couldn't reason with them, so he ended up, by some confusing twist, in a psychiatrist's office, explaining the whole situation with Madeline sitting next to him, holding his hand and kissing him softly on the cheek.

Even the psychiatrist told him that Madeline didn't exist. He wasn't willing to admit that she was sitting next to Brian in the office. Madeline couldn't speak, she just stared at Brian and cried. It was surreal and Brian many times questioned the reality of it. Was it just a horrific nightmare? Never once did he question the existence of his beloved; that would be crazy.

And so he ended up in a psychiatric ward. He slept on the floor and let Madeline sleep on his bed. But they never fed her and never took care of her, so she deteriorated. The doctors were constantly telling Brian that she didn't even exist, but he reacted violently, wanting nothing more than food to give her. And so she fell mortally ill within only a few days.

One day Brian walked into the room and she was gone.

He had never been able to accept that, and all the meaning of his existence fell apart. There was nothing left to love about the world, nothing left to live for. Reality was torn away from him and he lay exposed before the world, stripped of his skin and clothing. He was nothing. He didn't even know how he survived. So he slept.

Day in and day out he fell into a routine, his mind decaying into nothingness. He was an empty shell, barely living, a zombie in a psychiatric ward. Life had no meaning to him anymore, and so he stopped living it. He simply forgot to die.