The man who never lived

The first story I ever wrote

The man who never lived

I see a girl outside of my house, next to the bridge. She’s surrounded by a group of men who look like they’re beating her up. Naturally, I go outside to help her. Not as an altruistic hero who knows that he can save the day but just me, going there do something and see what happens.

            The first thing I do is call out to them and ask them to stop. It obviously doesn’t work and they just ignore me and pretend that I’m not there. I suppose that to them they don’t think that a weakling like me would get involved in a fight. I run in front of her between her and the guys beating her up.

“I suppose that you think that I’m too weak and insignificant to matter in this situation. That’s true enough I guess but let’s just say that I look at life a bit differently to most people.”

I try to block there attacks and get beat up a lot. I’m too weak and slow to get any significant hits in and just look really awkward and pathetic when I’m getting beat up. They knock me down and I sit there crouched over.

“Why are you doing this kid? You’re not cool or epic. You just look pathetic. People like you need to get with reality and figure out that you aren’t even doing anything helpful. We’ll still get to her and beat her up so your pain is all for nothing. This isn’t a movie. This is real life. Man, you really are pathetic”

“Thanks for trying to help me but I think it’s best if you just leave. I’m sorry about all of this.” The girl says to me, feeling sorry for me.

“Sure, I’m not strong or hero material. I don’t have the money to bribe you or the means to mess with you. I’m not doing this because I’m altruistic or to prove that I’m not a chicken. I’m what you would think of as a guy who never really was alive to begin with. I’m only still here to see if there might be some kind of purpose for me or helpful way of me dying. If I die then I die. If I live I live. Neither matter to me at the moment. But anyone else probably wants to live and has some kind of meaning or purpose in their life. So who am I to ignore them when it comes at no cost to me?  It also makes life a bit more interesting anyways.”

I stand up and look at the girl. “I hope you get what I’m saying. I don’t want any pity or concern for my safety. If there is any way that I can help you that you can think of then please let me know. Anything. Remember I was never alive to begin with”

She looks at me with an interesting face, sort of confused, but more like she was surprised because she got what I meant and doesn’t have to hold back anymore.  She grabs me and pulls me onto her and holds me in a hug.

“I see. Just don’t let go, even if I’m unconscious or dead.”

“Also...Thanks” I reply thankful that she understands what I mean and can treat me like that. I didn’t think it was very likely that someone would be able to treat me like this if they weren’t selfish.

“I suppose this is where I should be saying something like ‘you shouldn’t just throw your life away like that’ or ‘I should be thanking you’ but I think that I understand you enough to know that you won’t want that. I’m both thankful and glad that I can help”

“I’m not sure what’s going on here so I’m just going to do what I do understand” one of the guys says as he comes towards us. They all crowd around and start kicking me and hitting me with sticks and things. Some of them hurt the girl but most of them hit me. After a while the guys look like they are starting to get bored or tired. “Man, that’s one stubborn kid. I wonder if he’s still conscious. Well I have other stuff to do so let’s get going then”. They leave over the bridge next to where we were.

After they’ve left the girl pushes me off of her and starts to sit up. I lie there a bit and then eventually begin to sit up too. She helps me.

“Looks like you didn’t die after all” she says to me. “Why don’t we hang out some more then?” I stare at her blankly for a few seconds.

“I guess. Do you have a place to stay?” I ask her.

“Unfortunately, no. Do you”

“Sort of. It depends if I feel like staying there or not though. They don’t check up on me or care whether I’m there or not.”

“Something tells me that you like it that way.”

“Yup. It’s pretty good. I don’t like being forced into things or trapped in situations so I like it like this. So where do you plan to go tonight then? It’s pretty late.”

“I’ll probably just go to the park and sleep there” She replies. “You want to come too?”

“Yeah sure.”

We go to the area where we are going to sleep and while lying next to me she starts talking to me. “Are you in any pain? For some reason it doesn’t look like you are.”

“I’m not in any pain, no,” I reply.

“Why is that? How can you not be hurt after all that?”

“Pain means nothing to me. Like I said I don’t care whether I live or die. I don’t have to be worried that I might die and to me pain is only an indicator of that. I don’t have to keep good care of my body so I have no reason for pain.  But most of all, I don’t experience pain because I understand my position in my existence. Because I can clearly see how insignificant and unimportant this life is for me I know that something like pain doesn’t matter at all. In the long run I will experience things like pain and happiness unimaginably more than I would now. It’s too much of an insignificant thing for me.”

“I understand. I like you. You may not have any qualities that seem to matter in this life like coolness, good looks, high intelligence, money or anything physically amazing but you have the most important thing. Something that most, if not all people don’t have and never will. You understand your position and you look past this insignificant life and think too the future. No one else cares about anything apart from this world. I don’t know how your position works but I think I understand enough to know that you understand what’s actually important and are, therefore, the one person that I respect in this world.” She looks at me. She has the smile of someone who has finally found a ray of hope and happiness in a dark and cruel world. Maybe this life of mine isn’t as insignificant as I thought.

We stay together. We only use the house that I stayed at for showers and just sleep wherever, usually the park. We walk around a lot, but only in one direction from the park. We never cross the bridge. Why, I don’t know. I suppose that it feels like it’s somewhere I’m not meant to go yet. It might just not be the right way for us to go in this life. It could just be a coincidence. We talk sometimes. I think that this girl starts to understand me. She seems interested in me but she understands enough about me to know how to treat me differently from a normal person.

“You know, I’m starting to really like you. You’re a very unique person. I like being around you because I feel like you’re real and I can be real around you. I don’t have to act fake and I don’t have to try and figure out what you mean or what your intentions are. It’s kind of ironic though because you’re real but you were never alive. Life’s pretty twisted that way.

“I think that you are like this because you understand what’s significant in life. You’re probably right though. This life seems pointless or insignificant in the long run. You’re a really wise and understanding person. It’s really a shame that you have no purpose and interest in living in this world. Do you ever feel like there is any purpose or any reason to keep on living?” She asks me.

I turn and look at her. I look deeply into her eyes. She can probably tell just from my eyes what my answer will be. “No. As much as you understand me, you don’t understand how dead I really am. The thing about life is that it’s always different depending on your situation. I just happen to be really dead inside. We each are unique in our own way and have things about us that others just won’t understand.”

She looks down sadly. “What about love? Isn’t that something beyond our understanding and maybe even our dimension or reality? Don’t you feel what I feel for you? I’m not desperate here. Aren’t we perfect for each other? Are you still as dead as you were to begin with?  Did meeting me not change you at all or your perception on life?”

She was getting really sad now. She was almost in tears. Not the kind of tears of a desperate girl who was wishing for something impossible but the kind of girl who thought that she understood life and was in terms with reality.

“I’m sorry” I reply crushing her last bit of hope in this life. “I’m just not meant for love. The world of the individual that is me doesn’t have anything to do with love. It just wasn’t meant to be. Like I said, my situation is very unique but it’s also really extreme. I’m sorry but it might not be something that you can understand. I’m not alive and never will be in this life. It might appear wrong to be certain about something and I wouldn’t usually but this is something that I can be certain about.”

She looks down at the ground, still sad but coming back to reality. “Fair enough. I suppose I should have guessed that. You probably were the perfect person for me but it was just my luck that it was one way. As much as I like you I could never picture you in that kind of relationship anyway. Maybe that’s just what happens to people like us.”

“You’re probably right. I could never understand why people think love or anything could be that important. Understanding is your gift, not mine.”

After that we both continued on as if nothing had happened. We both knew our positions so there was no reason to act any differently. We both lived our lives, just together. We sometimes talked but usually there was no need. I never really had to protect her again or anything. She would sometimes ask for my opinions or philosophies about things to do with life. That’s all we really talked about. It makes sense though. She understands things. I have the ideas and philosophies that she’s interested in and I could die at any time. All I will be is a memory or maybe only an unknown source of knowledge. Do I even want to be remembered? Does it matter either way? Maybe my deadness and lack of interest in life was so that I could come up with things that normal people couldn’t. The girl still plans to live on in life so maybe my purpose was to help her. It’s probably just a coincidence though that happened to work out. I’m just going to fade away but at least it might not have all been pointless now. I might have helped her out in her world.

It’s been a while and I haven’t died yet. There just hasn’t been any reason to. If the girl understands me more and more then will she eventually understand me completely? Or will there be a point where she can’t learn any more from me so I will just die? This isn’t a fairy tale. I will still die and there will be an end. I will still die. I don’t feel any more alive than when I met here so why am I still here?

We keep on living and she keeps learning. As time goes on I can see that my end will be soon. I figure out more about my life and what’s going to happen. My perspective was wrong. Or rather that it’s wrong now. My life wasn’t meant to have a simple way of ending. I have to end it and move on from this world. The more we continue to live the more I understand how I’m going to die.

The day has come. I leave a note next to her and I leave while she’s sleeping.

When she wakes up she sees the note. It was a poem. This is what it wrote:

 

Bridge

A bridge doesn’t just connect two pathways but is a quicker, simpler way of getting there.

If the bridge wasn’t there then it would take a lot longer to get there and would involve a different path.

Without the bridge you might not even be able to get to where you are meant to go.

A bridge often crosses over a separate pathway.

The two aren’t connected but just happen to meet at that point.

When looking over at the other pathway that you cross you only catch but a glimpse of what their journeys are like.

When two people on journeys cross paths like this it’s important to know that they’ll have to move on really soon.

 

To me this bridge will take me from this life to the next.

Instead of having to keep on living for no reason this is a quicker, easier way of moving on.

This bridge is the one thing in this world that I feel is important.

Nothing else in this life has anything to do with my future except for this bridge.

I just happened to cross paths with you on this journey called life.

It’s not fate or destiny, we simply met.

We only knew each other for a short time so you only have seen a glimpse of what I’m like and what my journey is.

We would eventually have to move on and live our lives without each other.

Luckily we both knew that.

 

She puts down the note. She’s sad but not crying. “So your time to leave had come.” She throws out the piece of paper. “Since you’ve moved on it’s about time that I did the same.”

 

She lives on. She forgets that I ever existed out of respect for me. As much as she would like to move on she just doesn’t have anything to move onto. She feels as dead as I did. She lives on, only to live on. She feels like she’s leaving something behind. The thing that was most important to her. She doesn’t remember why but she feels like the one thing that is important to her has left. Leaving her with nothing and all alone.

The men come back and beat her up a lot. They come from over the bridge. She doesn’t know why she stays near the bridge but she does. They leave her nearly dead on the side of the road or lying in the park. They do this regularly. Sometimes someone helps her and help her heal and give her food. Usually she just doesn’t die. She doesn’t know why or how but she never seems to die. Even when she’s not injured or beat up people sometimes help her out and let her stay with them. They’re just regular humans though so she never stays with them for that long. She usually just leaves without any notice. This goes on for a while. She always survives though, even though she has no will to. As much as she feels dead she still feels like it’s just regular human deadness rather than understanding her position. The one main difference is that she is always in pain.

The men come again and when they’re beating her up one stops them and starts talking to her. “Why do you stay here? We always find you here. Why don’t you just leave, since you don’t have a home anyway?”

“I don’t know,” She replies staring blankly at the ground. “This is just my spot. There is a reason I wait here that I don’t know but is important and special to me. You can’t take that away from me.”

“You’re weird,” they reply laughing at her. “I see you around here in different places but never over the bridge. Is there any reason that you don’t go over the bridge?”

“I’m not meant to,” she replies as dead as ever, looking at the ground still. “I’m not sure why but I know that I’m not supposed to go over that bridge.”

“So what happens if we take you over the bridge then? If you’re not meant to go then let’s find out what happens if you do,” they say as they start to drag her over there. They are all laughing as they pull her in front of the bridge.

“I won’t go over the bridge until the time come,” she says without giving any resistance.

They are on the bridge now and are about to pull her on. “Looks like you’re going to be a rebel and go over the forbidden bridge now.”

The girl feels a gentle hand on her shoulder pulling her backwards. She slips away easily from the men. The bridge breaks and the men all fall. The girl looks around to see me standing over her. All of her memories come back. She remembers the one person that was important to her, the reason that the world seemed so dead and pointless without him.

“I’m not sure how I got here or how the bridge broke but I’m back now,” I say. “Even though a bridge can take you to a new place, sometimes you aren’t meant to go there. The bridge was what was keeping me trapped in that existence of deadness. Now that it’s gone I am alive now.”

“But I thought you died though. Did you jump off the bridge or did you travel over it to a new place?”

“The bridge really took me to the next life. It was where everything made sense and where I had purpose and meaning in my life. It was like the world that I thought was everything during my times on earth. But just because that world happens after this one it doesn’t make it any more important. That’s the one thing that I didn’t understand.  It turns out that I’m a special case where my true life with meaning and purpose is here. This life isn’t as fulfilling or purposeful as the next but it does have one thing as good as the next one. Love. In other words, I came back and chose this world over the next one because of you.”

 “So I was meant to stay here after all,” she says as she takes a sigh of relief. “You seem different this time, before you were the awkward guy who would never work in a relationship. Now you seem perfect for it. It turns out that it wasn’t meant to be one way in the end after all.” She walks over to me and punches me.

“Ouch” I say surprised and confused.

“Does it hurt?” She asks me.

I think for a moment and then realize what that feeling is. “Yes it does,” I reply. “My life’s completely different now. Whether I live or die matters. I fear death and worry about my safety. I have a purpose and reason to live. This world may not be perfect or make sense but it’s that unpredictability and unfairness that makes you really grateful for when you live on. We will both have to survive in an unfair and cruel world. We will have to live this life without ever knowing why our love matters and what the future will hold. This is how I’m meant to live my life.”

            We live our lives on earth in this existence. We fight hard to keep on living and even though we experience pain and unfairness we still live happily. We worry about the next life and our survival but not as much as we care about just being together. We don’t know why we find it so important but we do. We live perfect lives in the imperfect world. We die and we don’t know where we went. We didn’t plan for the next life. We probably could have. Either way our time on earth was the most important thing to us. We don’t know why but it’s that uncertainty that made us know that it was meant to be.

Reviews

[Thellstar]

Very profound I liked it.