Notre dernier lutte

Our last fight was just that, though I didn't know it at the time, our last fight. I think that perhaps you had more of an inkling that it was our last fight than I did, and part of me still hates you for that. Your advantage, and you were good at taking any advantage you could, was that you knew it was the onset of nuclear winter. I, on the other hand, just thought it was another fight, not our last one. If I had known that things probably would have gone a little bit worse. Though, in retrospect, I am not sure how things could have gone more badly than they did. I suppose the police could have been called, a report taken, and some one's day entirely ruined in an entirely different way.

However, I didn't know it was our last fight. I figured that it was merely a skirmish in our occasional war, and that we would, as usual, end up in bed, exhausted, and struggling to remember who started the silly fight, and what the damn thing was about to begin with, but that didn't happen. Or more to the point, part of that happened, we ended up in bed, at first together then separately. That was, now that I ponder on it, just another brilliant part of your all too brilliant plan. A plan that I, in my idiocy, walked into like a drunk staggering into the all night bar desperately in search of that last drink which will bring sweet oblivion onto him, and make all the demons stop moving the furniture around in his booze addled brain.  Little did I realize that the oblivion was not the oblivion of a drunken fool, but the oblivion to which we consign people to whom we have nothing left to say.

That was the beauty of the last fight, at least for you, you got to say everything last thing you ever needed to say to me, and I just thought it was a passing lark of a fight. If I had known that the 'end of the affair' was taking place, I would have put just a little more effort into it. It was quite unfair of you, and I still (after all this time) resent you for it. It was well-played, but I was the one being played, and that, as you had told me numerous times before, being the one played is quite as much fun as one is led to believe. In many, sad, loser-like ways it makes a little part of me still admire you after all this time. You were the one that called me the master manipulator and here you were playing me like a Pac-Man game. It makes me feel like I was a 'sample' of some foul, oddly named disease being placed on a slide and put under a microscope that was designed to find flaws that only you could see.

You saw them well enough, you even had a couple of people (whom you would refer to as my best-friend, never wondering why there was more than one) tell you exactly what they were, and how to avoid them. Which, of course, was to avoid me. You chose to ignore those warnings of dire consequences, and pushed forward with our relationship like Admiral Farragut steaming into Mobile harbour.  The torpedoes that M. Farragut had damned you didn't seem to notice, or if you did notice them, you were able (in spite of little help from me) in navigating us around them with skill that would make any AB seamen blush. 

I didn't have the same advantage, your best friend was not as forthcoming about your flaws, at least not until the information was no longer of any use to me, and that is to their credit. I suppose I should look into the 'best friend market' and see if they are selling a more loyal, less honest to prospective girlfriends model. Even if such a remarkable model were to exist, I somehow doubt it is too late in my life to break in some new 'best friend.' My type of friend is more than happy to leave my side when I am down, even though they will tell me that they never would. But they leave just like you did, perhaps the lot of you could have gotten some sort of group discount for leaving me, a sort of 2 for 1 special on leaving me on the cold, bitter outside looking in at a life that I had became a stranger to. A little bit like an extra in a deleted scene of my life.

Which is another aspect of your brilliant plan, that I can only hope you realized, before you executed it.  People in general, and me in particular are very good at recording the last of something. If the Rolling Stones ever forfeit their deal with the devil, and retire, I am sure a whole host of cameras will be around for their final performance.  If I had known that fight was to be a farewell performance for us, I would have also remembered more of it than I presently do. I have a fairly good memory, but I can't record all of my life. I don't have that many reels of tape inside my head.  If I had known I would have started a new reel for us, one probably marked "the end, do not reopen for X years", but I didn't and therefore much of what was said I can only guess about.  You are in possession of the "Director's Cut" of our final fight, and I doubt any request of me for a copy would be met with any sort of success. That reel of tape, that you probably destroyed, might just make me be able to make a little more sense of what happened.

Not that it should make sense, a lot of endings don't make sense, and they don't have to make sense to anyone, not even you, the ultimate director of this ending. Watch a few older French films, and you will come to the realization that the ending sometimes isn't even close to the most important part of the film, and quite often has little or no connection with the story that has engrossed you for the last two hours or so.  Happy endings, or endings with some sort of plot twist are a bullshit way of Hollywood trying to make themselves seem normal or more clever than the rest of us, they are neither. Quite often endings are just tacked onto the story to give the audience (not the actors) a sense of closure. In this type of production, closure is much more difficult to obtain. For some of us with limited sense, and even more limited access to the final script, closure might be well neigh impossible. This type of production does not follow the calendar year, in fact this fight happened years ago, and although it was about this time of year, the post-production (as it were) continues to this day. Funny that. 


P.S. I guess the irony of this post (at least in an American sense of the word) is that I am just as unhappy with its ending as I am with the ending of our last fight. Happy New Year dear readers!