No Title Given

Confession II

This submission was sent untitled. The email subject line was simply ‘Confession’. Given this confessor likes to keep things cool and laconic, I figured I should do the same. Hence, our first ‘untitled’ confession; one of many, I hope. Do keep them coming in, folks. Anyway, it’s a short one for today, so I’ve let my commentary lapse, but still there’s plenty to enjoy. I trust you will…

Yesterday evening it finally occurred to me to confess it all. The transgressions I have bottled up over the course of my life could fill several lush cellars. And unlike my old, sell-out friends, and their Ken Doll husbands, I myself don’t have a cellar to fill. So I’ll have to fill a page instead.

At the age of sixteen I fell pregnant to an ignorant jock with scintillating blue eyes (a lifelong weakness). I broke our casual thing off a week after the termination, without saying a word. I was hardly to know then that a decade and a half later he would crash his red pick-up, drunk, and leave his young family—and second wife—destitute. I remember being caught in the slow, snaking traffic of that crash, but I didn’t know his car or I suppose even him after all these years, so as I drove past the upturned wreck, I felt nothing. His widow was one of my classmates, not exactly a friend, but she told me all this wetly (her eyes and nose, mainly) in the freezer aisle of the grocery store last week; I couldn’t shake the chill til I was home in bed, ensconced under three blankets and a sheet at three in the afternoon.

That might be why I am now confessing things, even in this limited way.

I have always felt that my selfish decisions in life have redounded most heavily on those around me, but only long after the fact. It’s as if the butterfly’s wing flap gets lost in the post, filed into one of Kafka’s timeless drawers, before finding its way meaninglessly out again years later. I just called this only a feeling, but I know it to be a fact; the baleful rumbling of the sky has always occurred to me well before the heavens’ fearful dilation.

Everything seems to move according to its own logic and automatically, with scant regard for my miniscule, human sense of time. I count every day without a revelation as a blessing, but when you’re sitting across the table from the infinite, there’s no bet he can’t meet, exceed or wait out.  

I only moved back to my hometown a year ago; I had to manage the final act of my mum’s long decline. It’s only since being here that I’ve recognised my own decline, the inevitable shift from actions to consequences, has already long begun.