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“How long is this going to go on for?” Jack’s words echoed in his ears as if he had been throwing some type of pity party because his girlfriend had dumped him or something. As if he wasn’t forced to look into the mirror each day and stare back into a dead man’s reflection. Eyes that had reflected age far beyond his actual years and yet had been void of anything beyond the surface of a bitter shell of a person.
How long should he be allowed to be bitter about being dragged into this pathetic excuse for existence? How long does it take one to adjust to this prosthetic existence of a body? His hands gliding against a brick wall, a brick wall that no longer resembles any difference in feeling to that of another human being. The lack of warmth that once radiated from the skin, now leaving nothing but a substitute of cold flesh. How long would it take one to adapt to being a walking corpse?
A corpse wandering around his flat as if it had any business doing so. If he still had any concept of faith, he’d thought his existence might just be an injustice to life. What becomes of existence once every facet of himself has disintegrated into ashes? Was it no different than an animated corpse dwindling around, trying to imitate a soul that was as dead as it was?
The feel of the lake water flashes back to him. Rushing down the pier, desperate for any minuscule sign that a part of him might still be alive. The water taking him under, the stillness of his body, stagnant in nothingness. That stillness he had been searching for his entire life, yet in death, he still could not find. Coldness of the water that his skin could no longer feel. The gasping breaths for air that he no longer had.
Would his body have withered away over time if he had stayed down there? Or would it have stayed trapped in its unchanging state, merging into its surroundings, stagnant, refusing to let go of the dreaded soul trapped inside? Just drifting.
“I get to die forever, funny that.” He remembers speaking those words as if it should have come as a surprise. As if his entire existence wasn’t already the essence of that, long before the bullet had hit him. It was poetic, really, his death symbolising the tragedy that had been his life. Days floating by, the remains of himself being stripped away throughout his life until his death had claimed the little fragments still left. He can’t recall the last time he actually felt human, but he suspects it was long before his body had finally come to expose what was left of him.
Half his life he had spent flirting with the edge of death, chasing that stillness. Although.. Had he known the terrifying darkness that instead awaited… and yet here he was, still desperately searching for that quietude of being.
Existence was really its own curse in a way. And now this was his fated eternity, and Jack still somehow managed the audacity to look him in the eyes and question why he might be a bit resentful. The embodiment of eternal life looking onto the embodiment of eternal death; how wonderfully poetic. If there was any hell, Owen’s pretty sure he and Jack were already living it. Fated souls dragging each other to the pits of hell describes his life really.
What even was he? An abomination to the very idea of living. A reflection of the broken fragments that were put together never seemed to fit. Endurance of existence that lacked any resemblance to actual life. He was just here, existing… trapped in this liminal state between the dead and the living.
Maybe Jack would never understand. Maybe he wasn’t meant to. Immortality and undead were opposites pretending to be the same curse. And he was so tired of pretending.