Reasons I’ll Probably Die Alone, Episode 21
By: Jon Scott
Tags: Humor, Life, Love, Short Story, Failure

Reasons I’ll Probably Die Alone, Episode 21

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens

Photo by Andre Moura from Pexels

I am sure I have written of my monstrous exploits involving accosting a blind kid and inviting him along with another poor young lady to an abandoned bar in a satellite town not far from where I was living at the time. It was another in a long series of misguided attempts to be somebody, or to figure out who I was or could be.

Who I was back then and perhaps even now, is a follower. Not your average social media follower (I don’t think social media was a thing back then, but perhaps it was), but somebody who could adequately follow the directions of a superior, even if those directions were morally reprehensible.

What I have not written about is that we were never too far away from the blind kid. He was a student and by some stroke of misfortune on his part, lived within a hundred feet of my place.

I would have been happy to leave him alone, except that I had fallen in love with one of his housemates. I have no idea what her name was, although I’m sure I knew it then, because how can you fall in love with someone and not know their name? I first laid eyes upon her in their communal kitchen. She was like some kind of angel in jeans. That’s a shitty description. The truth is, I don’t even remember what she looked like, but I remember I was sold on sight (something which my blind friend was regrettably incapable of).

It became apparent from that first encounter that the blind kid had an interest in her too.

My interest in women back then was indicated by the appearance of a mix-CD which I would stay up late into the night compiling, including a track list on the insert painstakingly handwritten out ahead of its presentation to the object of my affection.

The receiver would usually stare at it for a moment or two, and then up at me with a look I now know to be pity, and say “Aww, thanks! You really…you really shouldn’t have!”

Then I would usually see them only in passing when they were in a crowd of happy, smiling people on the way to somewhere I hadn’t been invited to.

It is, of course, much better this way. Sometimes I have conversations with people who were there at the time who say “Jon, if we knew then what we know now, and went back, we would be gods among men! Gods, I tell you!”

As a follower, I will vigorously nod my head to signal my agreement with that statement, but can honestly say without hesitation that they are wrong.

If we went back, we would just be a different sort of loser. If I went back, I think I’d be even worse.

This girl whose name I can’t remember and whose face is a beautiful blur, she got a mix CD too.

We were sitting in my kitchen one afternoon, the blind kid and me, and as soon as I produced this CD his demeanour altered almost imperceptibly — I could see it in his eyes, you might say. (I couldn’t literally see it because he had taken to wearing sunglasses all of the time).

He once told me that he really enjoyed playing computer games and we then had to have a conversation about that because he’s playing online golf or whatever and he’s playing it by ear. I couldn’t help feeling that golf was an empty enough experience. Turn out the lights and you may as well not bother. Better to get out on a real golf course where you can really do some damage.

“Hey, why don’t I take your CD back with me? I can give it to her,” he said.

“No, no that’s alright,” I said, “It’ll take you ages to find her, you’re blind.”

“Fuck off,” he said. “Give it here!”

I wish I hadn’t mentioned it at all.

“No, no, I don’t trust men in sunglasses,” I said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” he said.

I didn’t have a good reason not to give it to him and lacked the intelligence and guile to think up a reason on the spot, so I handed it over to him, to act as its temporary custodian. There was a joke in there somewhere. Something about putting my heart in the hands of a blind cupid. Something about love being blind? Yeah.

“Just tell her it’s from me, yeah?”

“Yeah. Course,” he said.

He wasn’t going to tell her. I stole some fruit from the bowl in front of him and left.

Then I felt bad and embarrassed, for everyone concerned. For the blind kid, whose name I still can’t remember, so he remains ‘the blind kid’ in perpetuity. I couldn’t even be bothered to give him a name, how awful is that? Even now that I have acknowledged how awful it is, I still can’t be bothered. I sometimes daydream about a future in which I lose my sight, and then it would serve me right in some way, for being an insensitive jerk.

I felt bad for him then though, because he would give her the CD, and claim that it was a gift from him, but he wouldn’t know that I had written a little note inside it and left my number there too.

I felt bad for myself, because the mix-CD was cringe-inducing on its own, and the addition of the little note inside made things a bit worse.

And I felt bad for the girl too, because…well…she had the unwelcome presence of two idiots in her life, and probably countless others too. She hadn’t wanted a mix CD. What she had wanted was a degree in psychology.

This period in my life was marked by occasionally triggering attraction in random and unforeseen ways.

Let me explain by way of yet another depressing illustration. I once received a second-hand compliment from one of my housemates. A girl who’d sat in my kitchen, had remarked to him that she liked that I was doing the washing up. She found it very respectful. Those might have been the words he used.

Men who do the washing up. That was on her list of turn-ons. You see? Go against the grain long enough, and someone, the right person, will notice. I just wasn’t experienced enough to take advantage of this quirk in her personality, probably because I was the kind of man who would rather do the washing up while she was at home imagining me in an apron. Looking back on it, I really was bucking the trend of my peers who were all off taking mind-expanding drugs and wrestling with each other’s clothes.

With most stories, it helps if there’s an ending, but life is not really like that. The end is: you die. I’m willing to concede that people in organised groups have decided that the end is: you go to heaven. And that’s nice.

What is the end to this particular story? Well, it is the continuing theme of this series, and involves a now familiar statement: “such and such happened and then I never saw them ever again”. The end.

And that is what happens a lot in life, isn’t it? People drift in and out and you don’t attach much meaning to this movement, and you rarely, if ever, think about it. You don’t sit down on a rainy afternoon and think that you might marry the girl in the jeans or the girl that likes the image of you standing over a sink. And you don’t think that the last time you will see either of them has already passed.

A few weeks later, I did see the blind kid, for the last time. He didn’t see me. I waved and everything, like a real idiot. He was standing on the platform opposite mine with a girl with her back turned to me. I was going back home. I got on the train after ten full minutes of waving and calling out to be heard above the din of service announcements. I stared out of the window at them, waiting to see if the girl would turn towards me.

The train pulled away and I didn’t know that it was the end, but you always get a sense that it is, when you’re on a train. It is the end of one place and the beginning of a journey to another. A necessary pause between worlds, which I suppose is what going to heaven must feel like.