Until The Last Sun Sets

Prolouge

I became what I am today at the tender age of 17, on a humid August night in the year 2011. I don’t suppose I'll ever forget the precise moment when the walls that had sheltered me came shattering down, and the monster that I have become arose from the rubble. Standing on the roof of Leigh Manor, a scream or a gasp ensnared somewhere in my throat as I peered over the edge with blurring eyes- the roof where I first tasted that soothing warmth of whiskey, and where first I tasted the sweetness of a woman's kiss. It was a long time ago now, so far back that all the days and weeks and months around it have all been wound up into one great knot that I hope to somehow untangle tonight, but that unforgiving moment stands out so sharply in my memory, so clear before me that I could paint the scene perfectly even with my eyes gouged out. Looking back on that moment, the one that occasionally resurfaces and that I try so ardently to bury, my bones melting,  I realize that I have been peering over the edge of that rooftop the entirety of my adult life, cautious and petrified and suddenly disrupted from the innocent bliss of what was, in some ways, a most tumultuous childhood. 20 years wasted standing on a rooftop, reliving the moment that defined all of our lives over, and over, and over.

Three weeks ago my aunt Donna called me from Halford, 40 minutes from New York city, and told me that she had but one month left to live. Leaning against my car with the phone to my ear, I couldn’t escape that nagging, niggling feeling that it wasn’t just Donna on the line, but a lifetime of unatoned sins I had buried deep and spent far too many years trampling over in the hope of crushing. After she hung up, I climbed into the car and drove for hours in the type of daze where all one sees are lights, flourescent and blinding, and everything else is just enshrouded in  darkness. I drove in a trance that might have scared someone who gave a damn whether they lived or died, unable to hide away behind my all consuming work,or my gaudy cars or my money piles any longer. Frightened and awakened from two decades of comforting lies and selfish disillusions, because now the two conflicting worlds that I had crafted, separated by time and distance had merged into one and I could no longer pretend to give a damn about all my petty distractions and flashy toys. I didn’t stop for water, for food. I didn’t stop until I reached the seaside at sunset, a six hour drive from Rome, and watched the gold and the red and the orange all entwine together and sparkle on the stilling waves. The setting sun illuminated the bay, stretching so far that it was hard to know where our world ends and a better, more pure one begins, and suddenly Aisling’s voice was whispering in my head, in a different lifetime beneath a different sunset.

I’ll wait for you, you know I will. Just... come back to me. Whenever you can, and I'll still be waiting.

Come now, Ais. You know I will, too.

Aisling the poet, and the artist, and the only person to ever quite touch my soul without pulverizing it at the same time.

I looked up at the sky until it was flooded with stars, and heard Donna’s voice over and over, those words she had added almost as an afterthought when both of our eyes had run dry and there was nothing left to say after 2 decades apart. Nothing I had done seemed to be of any significance anymore, in light of what had come before, and most what had transpired over those squandered years were hardly stories one could casually mention over the phone. You’re a busy man Alec, but even if you can’t come home for me, do it for her. And so having come too far to ignore a resurrected past any longer, I thought about Aisling. I thought about Danny. Rahim. My mother. Halford. All the people and the places that though constantly flitting on the surface of my mind, I rarely allowed myself to truly ponder or contemplate. I thought of the man I had aspired to be, and thought of the dreams I had dreamed an eternity ago before they were snatched and shredded, and of that humid August night that gave birth to the man who walks in my shoes today. Afraid to dive into the past, afraid to confront the sins that will always haunt me and that follow me regardless of where I secrete myself. Afraid of coming face to face with the people I have eluded for so long, and hurt in ways most could never comprehend.

At 38 years old, it kills me to admit that I have become a coward.

Ch. 1

“You’ll never understand what it means to truly live,” my mother told me,once. “Until you find something in this life worth living for.”

I had not dared to ask her what it was she meant and it gnawed at my mind,for even though her words had sparked a thousand questions on my lips, I was far too young, too naive, to understand just how clichéd her words were. They seemed so intelligent that for the briefest of moments that I ignored the fact that she, the furthest woman from a philosopher conceivable, had probably just recycled them from one of those afternoon soaps seemingly constantly on repeat and sat in awe, pondering whether or not to talk back. In the Wilde household there was but one unspoken rule; never speak to mother until given permission to do so. I was allowed to watch cartoons until midnight, when I would fall asleep draped across the sofa, and if I managed to find loose change during my daily treasure hunt, I could buy whatever tooth ache inducing treats I saw fit to buy. There are no rules restricting a child from doing as they please when their mother spends her days in bed, or sleep walking about the house with open eyes, hardly noticing she has a child at all. My neighbours fed me, clothed me, taught me to read and to count, but they took no responsibility for my wellbeing as soon as I crossed the threshold into our dingy apartment. And so, from the day I was born to the age of 8 I essentially did as I wished. Alec Wilde was, at the age of 8, independent. Alec Wilde was lonely, something I have found to be the only true source of insanity, the seed from which derangement flourishes.

But that day, amazed that she had noted my existence at all, I had allowed myself to be pulled up onto her lap, and as I began to toy with her knotted, almost wispy blond hair she had listed off all the things that people live for. Love. Family. Duty. Honour. Patriotism. In that harsh, throaty voice of hers she had told me of how some live for work, some for wealth, some for greed. Even then, I had known such things to be a mere illusion of happiness. I had been no older than 5, and though the teaching that people actually thought of money and materialism as the sole reason for their existence went against everything I had thus learned, I idealized that coldhearted shell of a woman to the point where I took her every word as gospel. It is, perhaps, the first true, solid memory I have because, to an extent, the questions she raised that afternoon have never really left me. They are always there, rolling over and over vociferously in this  mind like a wheel; how exactly do we know that what we think is right for us, is right? How do we know that the thing we consider to be the reason we wake up every single day is the thing that gives us the most joy? The most comfort?

How do we know that what we live for is worth living for at all?

Donna told me many years later that Angela Wilde had been picked out by god prematurely, chosen out to gain her angel badge much too soon. To that I say bullshit, because that woman never did a thing garnering her worthy of salvation. Of all the fools and saints and cynics that walk this earth, a woman barely alive at all, holding onto life with the loosest of grips for 8 years, was hardly your ideal candidate for one of God’s special angels. Uncorrupted and innocent as I was, I knew that my mother had gone voluntarily, had booked her 1 way ticket to heaven long before the day the teacher called me aside and whispered words that, though no longer etched on the overflowing canvas of my mind, have left a permanent scar that no amount of clawing can scab away. My mother’s eyes were dull and bloodshot, and when she spoke she spoke so monotonously that I had wondered once if she was alive at all, or if she was a flesh eating zombie just waiting for the right moment to tear me to shreds. I recalled that of her when I had grown a fair bit, and realized it then, what she had said about truly living. Her heart pumped blood that coursed through her veins, and her lungs expanded and contracted as good as any lungs. But what had she had to live for? She was unemployed and living off of mysterious packages that arrived in the post every other month. She was a single mother without a man to warm her bed, had no friends to meet with for coffee breaks, and had been cut off neatly and with precision from all family but her equally downtrodden sister. She had never given a damn about her homeland, had lost her honour long before I was born. Some might say,quite naturally, that she did have something worth living for; a son, 8 years old and starved of love, but I was the genesis from which all of her other problems sprouted, and she sure as hell never gave me a second though when she wound that rope about her neck. They never told me how she died, but I had always been so smart, so creative. Our  apartment had no gun and only blunt butter knives, and Angela preferred to discard the pills Dr. Madison insisted she purchase than actually take them. The rope was swift, and it was clean- the perfect means of escape for a woman who wandered slowly through life never really moving at all, but who still left a trail of destruction in her wake regardless.

The days surrounding my mother’s death have blended into one great swarm over time, and I no longer remember the more intimate details; the hour at which she was found, the colour dress she wore when cremated (there was no funeral- who would have come?), the doctors in the hospital who spoke with a tone of impatience as if I had actually chosen to waste their time. I no longer remember the name of the neighbour who practically raised me, or the school I attended for 3 years of my life. Compared to what followed that far off period of my life, those years which for most serve as the foundation blocks upon which we build have never seemed all that important to me. No, the only things that I have truly carried with me from those dark days were the memory of my mother (the very opposite of what I hoped to ever be),the empty feeling in my stomach that could only be explained by the absence of a father's love (if ever I had a son, I would never leave his side), and the look on my teachers face as she informed me in as sensitive a fashion as she could that my mother was dead. I don’t know if I cried. I don’t know if I felt anything other than that guilty sense of relief I still feel now when I think of that day. But I will never, ever forget the gleam of pity in that woman's eyes as she realized that I was now not only poor, but orphaned also to the best of her knowledge. It’s impossible to disguise, pity, and seeing it before me is in truth the one thing I fear. It shows weakness. It shows inferiority.

And as I left Fairhill for the first and final time at the age of 8, orphaned and wrapped in the only threadbare coat I owned, I swore to myself in the back seat of a taxi that I would spend the rest of my life ensuring I was never again on the receiving end of a pitiful glance. (I failed, understandably, for quite some time- I was rolling in poverty and my mother was dead.) I swore that I would never be the one left dangling at the end of any string, that I would find something, anything in my life worth living for, and God have mercy on me if I didn't.