trying to take possession of will just turn right around and take possession of you.
He used to like to use fireflies as an example. Fireflies in a jar.
No matter how big or how small. Catch fireflies in a jar.
You capture and kill a star.
Then the star will burn no more. Fireflies should not be in a jar.
Anyway, I guess at some point in my life I decided to challenge all of that, and I did.
I owned a lot.
Now, well, I guess I’m dead. Someone else owned me.
“Life is about consequences,” Emily said as she stood over my body. My sweet Emily.
Interesting how my final moments look so much like hers, as she lay in the delivery room, hemorrhaging from some freak accident that robbed her of the rest of her days.
That was then, and this is now. She stood there, over my lifeless body. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I would be seeing her when I died. I’m not sure why.
I guess it’s because I had my mind made up that she went up north, and I’d be going down south. Once I had that locked into my mind, it was all fair game. If I had known then what I know now, I would have made a lot of different choices, a whole boatload of them. Shit, a whole county of them. But I didn’t.
I stared down at the floor, face flushed in shame.
I am not a man. I am not anything. I am unworthy of her presence. “Danny?”
I glanced up at her, like a scared little boy who just got caught doing something very, very wrong.
She’s holding a HUGE syringe.
“Each day is a new beginning,” she said as she raised the syringe high in the air and slammed that son of a bitch into my heart.
The weight of a freight train crushes the light, crushes my chest, and sets my soul on fire. I mean, literally on fire. I was burning from the inside out. So this is it. I was right; I’m on my way down under. Isn’t it ironic that the person I loved most in my life ended up being the one that opened the door?
The afterlife is a lot more painful than I could have ever imagined. I could feel the fire rushing through my entire circulatory system. It was crushing my chest, rushing through me so hard that I thought I might cough out an atom bomb.
Then it came. I inhaled.
I coughed.
Light ripped into my eyes. I tried to sit up.
“Fuck!” I yelped out as I fell back down.
I guess this meant I was staying here a little longer after all. The pain I had been in was nothing compared to the pain of knowing.
Knowing that I survived. Knowing what I have done. Knowing that I have lost it all.
The Fiber of My Being
That a nightmare. My life—a nightmare, a train wreck. A long line of endless bad choices, that’s me. I have a really hard time remembering how it is that everything skipped
so far off the tracks. Honestly, even the simplest memory of how I got here, handcuffed to this hospital bed, is kinda sketchy. I never saw this coming. I mean, I’m usually pretty good at seeing the upcoming twists and turns, but not this one.
“How are you feeling, Corbin?” said my attending nurse. I looked over at her and couldn’t believe my eyes. It was Melissa. I have known this girl since she was in diapers. Now, now that I have lost it all, now that I am the property of someone else, it has to be her? She’s even got the nerve to smile at me as I lay here, handcuffed to this God-damned bed.
I may as well be standing in line at a homeless shelter, begging for a plate of food. That is how low this is. The disrespect. The disgrace, humiliation, powerlessness, the loss, and this bitch is smiling at me, “Oh, just fucking peachy,” I said to her with a scowl. “Best day of my whole damn life!”
I always win; I always have the upper hand. I am always in control. You see, control equals ownership, and I always made it a point to possess everything around me. Or at least, as much of it as I possibly could.
I remember seeing June Taylor standing in my living room, acting as if she hadn’t been a homeless junkie sleeping in the post office for years. I remember her starting to poke around in my whole operation. I remember.
June, the junkie I had given so many chances to. June, who I had helped over and over and over again. Her?
It really had to be her?
Her and her buddies who banded together to be pains in my ass. They ruined everything.
Lives were lost, lives that could have been spared, but those lives were nothing compared to the carnage bestowed upon this town if the Cartel found out that the whole operation was exposed.
This place was going to burn, starting with me, like literally me. “My chest feels like hellfire over here; you got any drugs?” I said to my nurse.
“I’ll go talk to the doctor,” Melissa said.
“Make it snappy,” I said to her, as rudely as the driven snow.
Listen to me, talking to her like that. I’ve known that girl her whole life for Christ’s sake. Now I lay here, handcuffed to the God-damn bed, my chest on fire from that freight train mercilessly colliding with my heart at warp speeds, while she caters to me like I’m some kind of an invalid. I can’t even believe it. That junkie whore ruined everything.
“Sh-sh-sheriff- um, I mean, Corbin?”
Oh, and him! Deputy fucking Walker. This pansy-ass bitch has a lot of nerve. I thought he was on my team. I owned his ass. I had him under control.
“What!” I looked at his pussy ass standing in the doorway of my hospital room. “What the fuck do you want?”
He stumbles into the room, like the lazy, underachieving kid that was picked on his whole life, till he finally got himself a badge and now thinks he’s all that and a bag of potato chips.
“How’s it going?” he slightly stutters as he awkwardly inches his way into the room.
This fucking guy ruined everything that I had going. Everything. He’s the last person I expected to see stumbling into my hospital room. “How do you think I’m doing?” I shouted at him.
He hung back by the door, too scared to walk in.
“You look scared; that’s smart. You got good reason to be. You oughta be three states to the wind right now.” I smiled at him with a seething hatred. “While I sit here trying to get the tire tracks off of my back.” I laughed, but it wasn’t funny.
“I’m so-so-sorry,” he stuttered, shaking like a scared child.
“Cut me loose and maybe I’ll forgive ya!” I rattled my handcuffed hands at him.
