A Waste of Lives (part 1)

This will not be a happy tale. There is no surprise ending where everything works out in the end, no sudden twists of heretofore overlooked details that provide an easy solution to the problems encountered.

This will not be a happy tale, although there is much happiness along the way. Happiness and sadness, love and intimacy, elation and depression, betrayal and support. So for those of you clicking your way through the ether, looking for five or ten minutes of diversion before you get bored, let me save you a lot of time and I'll tell you how this ends.

The subject of this story (and it is a story not a tale, for this is a true telling) dies. He dies at his own hand, alone and unhappy, full of regret and sorrow, ashamed of his life, of his actions, of the trail of hurt and pain that he's left in his wake. He knows in his head and in his heart and in the very core of self that his life has been the catalyst for all the pain trailing behind him.

I am he. So there. You of short attention span can click on to something else, go find that next spellbinding reality show like "Real American Vagrants". For anyone else who may persist here for a while longer, let me warn you once again. This is not a story intended to entertain or to bemuse or to warm your heart with poignancy and a happy ending, for there is no happy ending. There is an ending; two actually. The main part of the story ends, ended, when my actions forced Tracie to remove herself from my life. The final end, the cleaning up of the last lingering dirty detail, is yet to come. That end coincides with my ending. My ending is that end. At that time, I will no longer be a threat to the happiness of anyone else. Sadly, my passing will not remove the hurts I have sown up to now.

From where I am now, not yet at the end of my life, but soon, I am already excruciatingly aware that my life has had no value. Perhaps that's not entirely true; my seed was required in order for my daughter, my lovely, bright, beautiful daughter to grace this world. And, I speculate, that along my twisted, sordid path, I may actually have provided support to a dear friend who was herself sick and hurting and alone and who by her own admission might have taken her own life during a particularly dark period if not for my support and friendship.

Playing my part to bring the gift of my daughter, who we'll call Amy, into the world will undoubtedly rank as the only achievement of any value that I was ever able to call my own but we must, in truth, admit that the providing of biological material was really the only part of her existence that was uniquely me. Her upbringing and education could have as easily been shaped by another man, perhaps even with better results.

The other "accomplishment", for lack of a better word, in my life that stands with any value is the role I may have played with a friend that I met late in life. Beth was weakened with an unknown and debilitating illness of varying symptoms which prevented her from continuing in what had been a promising and accomplished career, sometimes prevented her from climbing the steps and occasionally even made breathing difficult. When I met her she was already over a year into it and slowly declining. She was indeed in a dark place. We hit it off immediately and spent much of the next year and a half together. She helped me adjust to a newly single life as much as I may have helped her to continue on. By the time we finally parted ways, she had told me several times that she treasured our friendship and thanked me for it, admitting that without it, she wasn't sure she'd have had the strength to stay alive through the dark times.

Now you have to admit that's a pretty short list of accomplishments for nearly fifty years of life. Sadly, the list of actions for which I'm ashamed is significantly longer.

There are many shames and regrets in my life. An ongoing, on again/off again poor relationship with my mother, no relationship with my father, an early marriage and divorce, a long marriage of nearly twenty years to Rhianna and finally, a love and a life found then lost with the woman I was destined to spend the rest of my life with, Tracie. Each of those black marks in my lifes' record of actions deserves a chapter devoted to them alone. If there is time, I will write about each of them in turn, for they each deserve more for having endured my passage through their life than passing mention.

Tracie especially deserves more; deserved much more than she ever got from me. To be honest, this story is about her. She is, was, the nexus of my life, the intended destination of all the years of my life that lead up to meeting her. To really understand who Tracie was to me, which frankly I don't expect to be able to adequately convey no matter how much I write, for no matter how long, you need to be able to hold one thing that I will tell you as the unequivocal truth: I loved her, and moreover, I knew that I loved her and I knew that I would eventually spend my life with her from within days of the time we first talked. It may have been fifteen days or twenty six days, I'm not sure exactly when I knew, but I knew, quickly.

A sidenote here: if you cannot accept that as fact, as a fact of my life and my experience then you will not ever be able to understand who Tracie is to me. And if you cannot accept that I knew that she and I were destined to be together from almost the very beginning of our relationship, then you may as well stop reading now because the rest of this will not make any sense to you. If you cannot accept as fact the love and the destiny that I immediately knew was to be ours, then the telling of our story, of the trials, the troubles, the joys, the love and the ultimate betrayal of her and our love by me will not hold a fraction of the significance that they should. Unless you can truly understand the depth and the intimacy of the relationship that Tracie and I shared you will not be able to really grasp the depth and the extent of my betrayal of her and us. And unless you can accept and believe and understand the love we shared, then you cannot even begin to grasp the pain and the hurt and the injury to her very soul that I did to her. The betrayal of her, of all that I loved, which will soon lead to my end.

As of this writing, she and I still have a relationship, of sorts. In her words, we're "superficial friends". I'm not sure why she still allows this relationship, even at this level, but I don't question it, for to question it would be to make her reexamine it and look more closely at it and that would surely make her decide to kill it for good. That relationship, superficial as she may think it is, is what keeps me here and able to write these words. I feel I need to put these things down, soon, because I fear that the day quickly approaches when she will finally be tired of even this relationship. When that day does arrive, there will be nothing to keep me here any longer, and I will write as much of this sorry tale as I can before the emptiness and the pain, the sorrow and the shame, move me to action.

I must admit that part of the reason I feel the need to write this is as an act of penance, of contrition. I feel the need to admit, publicly, the hurtful things I have done and the shame and regret I have for all those things. But to be honest, there is another reason. I have a partly formed plan that after I have finally left, this will be delivered to her in some form. Not as punishment, G-d no, for she has suffered more than enough at my hand already. Rather, I hope this would serve as some apology, some explanation to her of how I really felt and maybe why things happened as they happened. I want her to know that through all the years of ups and downs of our special relationship, I never resented anything she did or didn't do. And to be completely honest, I hold some hope that someday, after the pain and hurt in her heart have diminished, that she may read this and think back on our time together, perhaps even fondly, and know that my love for her was true and real and deep, just as she thought it to be, before my betrayal. It's partly a selfish motivation, I know, the desire to be remembered not as a cad and a hurtful person but rather as someone worthy of her love, but in truth, that is how I pictured myself. Her friendship, given freely and without reservation, was the light of my life. Her love, given absolutely and without limit, was the light of my soul.

To think that I could destroy those precious gifts, so haphazardly and so casually, the very gifts that I had sought and pursued and nurtured from her for so many years, is beyond understanding. But the sins to be laid out here before you did happen; I did them. I'm not proud of them, by a long shot. The doing of these things destroyed the very life and the love that I sought with her. But I did them and I accept responsibility. If only bearing that weight could remove the hurts from her heart and from her soul then I could go so much more easily.