She Steals My Autumn

1

Now some people say that the only way to understand a story is to start at the beginning, hearing all the facts and learning the pieces as the story unfolds, but I found in my particular case to start at the end. That's what I think anyway.

Life always seemed to throw me a curve ball, hell I would have taken a fast break every once in a while, but whose counting the stitches on a baseball as it zooms past the plate? I sure didn't, but in the end it struck me dead center in my chest and not flying over the plate as I thought it would. That's my little metaphor for life, actually I'm not much of a baseball fan, but I couldn't think of anything to describe my life so simplistically.

Anyway, there I was, looking at the end of my life with a disdain for the things I had done, realizing that in the end there wasn't much I could do besides duck and cover as the food began to fly. "There goes a meat ball," or "there goes potato salad."

And I let the memories cascade down like potato salad, smearing against the wall of my heart as if there was really anything I could do. Once the words start to fly it's a shit storm, and once you start to take the bad rap you try to stand, only to find that your legs have forgotten their use and you tumble smoothly to the floor. That's what happened to me, looking back on a series of bad memories, choices upon choices and knowing in the end that I was dying accordingly with my karma. That's what it was anyway when it boiled down to it, karma. A one word killer waiting to drop an atom bomb over my life at any given moment. And it had really, although I couldn't really complain in the end because I had done it to myself. But Beth didn't deserve it, and I felt that if I had been given a few more days, hell a few more hours then I would have been able to mend some of the pain that my "karma" had caused. But I couldn't, as things usually turn out. That time had passed too, leaving me slipping by the wayside of my thoughts and my fears and the only person I could blame stood on the other side of that mirror. He gave me the finger a long time ago I reckon' but that's just me talking, funny how you start to hate yourself as the end draws near and you pray that God has judged you the way you want your heart to be judged.

I was always an accepting person, but not for this one. This one took the cake, and like that food fight, I ended up wearing most of it instead of ingesting it. I suppose in the end I had ingested it as well, but it was seemingly inevitable that I would do so with so much of it ending up all over my face. After all, it was MY food and I had nothing else to do but share the crumbs after it was all gone. But the party was over, my parents had left and they wouldn't be coming back, that was a certainty, my sister could barely look at me and as the curtains began to fall I saw nothing in my self that resembled the man that I respected so long ago.

The machine beeped periodically, letting me know that I was still alive. At least for the time being. I glanced through the plastic sheets hanging down all around me and glanced over at my wife, who was just across the way. She was fast asleep, looking like an angel, looking the way she always had when she slept and I smiled with the remaining strength looking across at her. Machines hissed the air back into my lungs, tubes stretched from my arms, and beneath the bed sheets, that extremely uncomfortable tube shot straight up my manhood allowing me to soil myself without actually wetting the bed. Lovely. This isn't how I imagined my going, but at the end of a road you have the ability to look left or look right, and I had picked neither, watching the cars pass me by on their own busy path of life, and I didn't have the courage to lift a thumb into the air and say "I could use a ride" to anyone. That was my perspective ten years back at least and I had stuck to it. This is where it got me in the end, maybe I should have thumbed a ride now and again, but what else do suckers do besides hope for a better tomorrow when they easily could have changed the present day?