Chapter 34: The Unloved and the Unlovable

“Is something wrong, Frank?” the Inspiring One asked, “You don't seem to be happy today?”

“How can I be happy,” I said, “She was my mother, wasn't she?”

“Yes, Frank,” the Inspiring One said, “You didn't share it with her in time. Her mind was nearly worthless to her and you weren't around to explain it to her, to help her see what you knew. I don't understand, Frank. Why was it so difficult for you to tell her? You had so many opportunities and the two of you were so close all your life? Why did you wait so long she couldn't do anything but role play that she was going to Heaven like the apostates?”

I was silent and numb feeling, you know? I felt like I should be feeling something and not feeling anything was harder on me than had I broke down and cried or even went insane again would have been. And I knew it. Why didn't I feel anything?”

The Inspiring One was deathly quiet. I could hear the leaves rustle on the tree outside the window of my room. I could hear the cars come and go for what eventually became a long time to my mind as the birds sang and the distant sound of a weed whacker drifted in from the background. I heard it all. And I saw everything in my room from where my chair was in the corner. It all register in my brain but none of entered my mind. I was not involved even in my immediate surroundings. I was the nothing I had always really ever been. I couldn't think. I couldn't feel. I didn't know, anything. It was all about my mom, but she just wasn't. And in my empathy for her, I knew she would never be, had never been, and never really was in order to really be someone someday.

“She was just a delusion of mine, wasn't she?” I said, “A delusion I loved so deeply I have always known what was going on with her. She was the last remaining part of my insanity, wasn't she?

“Yes,” the Inspiring One said, “Your writer never developed her character for you, because he wanted you to know what it is truly like to have one of them die. Even those like your writer read things into the people they love that is largely delusional. And they do it so often that they realize that all that is left of them is what is left when any delusion is overcome. He tried to make his mother understand, but she never did as far as he knows. She died and he has never saw her again. And he's afraid in his soul to think he never even knew her, but only the delusions of her he made up in his mind and the delusions his entire family made up in their minds. They all had a strong feeling for her. But he was the only one to get a glimpse of her pain, even the conscience They had given her. Her image, the delusion she showed everyone else, only a facade. His father's sexual abuse of his retarded step-niece destroyed her and in her shame she never showed herself to anyone.

But it was a beautiful delusion that touched many very deeply, just like you are in order to help some of those who read your story he has made up about you, except he doesn't believe you ever were. He's not Them, Frank Li. And he knows better because he knows Them, than to pretend he is Them, even to save your story from this sadness.”

“What you are actually saying then is,” I said, “My pain is his pain and I yet I made him feel it even though he knows I am only just another one of his many characters.”

“They gave him that insight, Frank Li,” the Inspiring One said, “And he has given it to you and it is with me and those who will read your story. Was it wasted? I don't know yet. Do you?”

Time passed.

And I realized he showed me the truth about them. Everything in space that occurred in that time that actually happened did just that. It happened. Time went on without me. My writer had nothing to say about me in the entire paragraph. The Inspiring One didn't know what to say either. It was a real moment for my writer and all the readers of the story of my fictional life if not even Them to weigh the impact I had on them. And I realized that is exactly how it will be in the end.

“I never really was insane,” I said, “There was no one here where I am.”

“You know?” the Inspiring One said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Can you share the truth with all of us?” he asked. “I know too, but I can't share it. It is too touching for me.”

I cleared by throat for it was thick with emotion.

“He was where I am in mind and spirit during his last suicide attempt,” I said, “All that was left was for his body to die and he wouldn't go to heaven or to hell. He had the opportunity to do something so many he feels for, do, since they all may yet cease to have ever existed. And he became sane when he attempted it.

He must have realized nobody had ever been real enough with him to even know him, much less love him, even Kathy the seventeen year old whom he wanted to marry when he was twenty. She never knew him. He never tried to get to know her, really, and she never even tried to really know him. And that is the way it was with everyone he ever had a relationship with in his entire life. Like so many he never had the courage to be vulnerable enough to allow anyone to even see the real person he was and he has never met up with anyone with that kind of courage either. He realized that because of that fact he had not only never been truly loved, he had never really allowed himself to live either. And he knew his body would die anyway. He was just ending himself before he ever began.

But just in case his body didn't die and he lived through murdering his own body again, he tried to make certain the times of his appointments figuring he might not be in shape emotionally to do it when he awoke from taking every medication in his cache if he didn't bleed to death after cutting his wrists having been discovered in time for them to postpone what was only going to happen to him in some much more horrible way in his old age in the end anyway.

Thus he called Mandy his AHRMS worker intending to make sure he wasn't mixed up about the having the right week, for they met only every other week. And from there his plan spiraled away from him beyond his control, for she took it he was reaching out to her when he tried not to lie to her, since people get so angry with people who mislead others in a case like his. And somehow he wound up sending texts back and forth with his Peer Counseling Specialist, Bobbie also hoping they would not keep him to busy to complete his plan before the cops intervened. But he manage only enough medication to make him want to sleep for about a day and a half. And in the end the sheriff did manage to intervene and remove him from the group home where he lives, saved the life of his body and got him incarcerated in a mental facility in Fargo for seventy-two hours.

But it wasn't a total loss. He got to know himself. He gained insight into everyone else. How they do love their little delusions. And he was not insane at the time. Even the psychiatrist in Fargo could find no pathological psychiatric symptoms at all, the first time in so long he cannot remember when it was last true, he was actually sane and can prove it. At last he had a real starting point.

Then days, even weeks later he conceived of me and identified with me.”

“Is he real even now?” the Inspiring One asked.

“Only They know,” I shrugged.