In Search Of

As much as we would like to be, only a few of s are the hero of a story. Often times, we aren’t even the hero of our own.

Coming to the realization that you aren’t the hero of your own story can lead you to taking the reigns. It can also lead you down a path of despair. Whether we try or not can determine the outcome, but after frequent attempts to try that always end poorly, it can be hard to continue.

The rather uneventful but not unhappy childhood of Shane Smith was at most adequate, but he was grateful for its lack of traumatic events. As Shane began to grow from a child into a man in his adolescent years, he realized an endlessly deep loneliness taking over. Having been constantly fed by means of multiple media the stories of others’ eventful lives, he found himself longing for a life of purpose that he couldn’t seem to find.

Pseudo-adulthood struck at the age of eighteen, and in search for a new start to find a purpose, he went on a hunt for it. From what he had read in books and seen on television, he understood that the events of his life can be altered by the smallest of actions or perchance collision with another person’s life. Knowing this he wished to simply start a connection and branch off from there. The search for this connection began in the outskirts of a small town.

Busses and hitchhiking seemed the most interesting way to get around and proved efficient to find a random destination. The kind of town where everyone knew each other’s name. The kind of town out of a Stephen King novel where kids have adventures together. He believed he could wedge his way into becoming one of these people, to stray from his heritage of being an outsider.

Arriving in this town, he needed a place to stay, and with his small savings found it best to seek refuge in an abandoned barn on the outskirts of town. A stop to the local store was of great excitement as Shane retrieved dinner for the night, for he could catch the cashier’s name in hopes that he would remember it. A possible lifelong connection could have been started simply because he chose E-Z Mart instead of the Neighborhood GroSure down the street while picking up bread and generic hazelnut spread.

Maybe there would’ve been a better connection at Neighborhood GroSure. Perhaps his soul mate was down in an aisle picking up a Powerade. No use focusing on the past. Time to head “home”.

Shane wasn’t scared of many things, and found rest easy in that chewed up barn. The white noise of the creaking and moaning somehow helped him sleep. His only worry was how he would clean himself up for the day ahead as he was covered in chipped red paint and hay.

He wrote in his journal as he preferred not to call it a diary, it seemed too feminine even though it is the correct term. A glance at the odd stamped paper, a piece of a picture he could never make out without the rest of the pieces, though there were four, sparked curiosity on the second night. His day hadn’t gone too swell and he began to question all of his life decisions up to this point. This poor state of mind drove him to do what a person should never do while in such a state of mind. He took the odd, tiny stamps, and swirled his tongue around it, scooping it up in a tornado of saliva.

The cracked wood above his head showed a starry sky and in it he saw Orion. He had never been star gazing before, but he found he enjoyed it. Somehow this made him feel lonelier than he did before.

A wave of calm took over until it was interrupted by a rustling that would drive fear into the most stoic of men which came from the long since empty corral below the loft he rested in. His fearlessness was gone. Anxiety took over. A heaving and pulling on every muscle in his chest brought about an odd sense of unreal pain that could tear him apart. Literally pull him apart.

What came out wasn’t something to fear. In fact, it was what he came here for. A person. Not the dangerous kind of person you would expect to crawl out of the dark at you in the abandoned carcass of a structure in the middle of nowhere. Not a farmer with his double barrel asking for Shane to get off his land. It was a young woman.

Her hair flowed like an ocean in an impossible manner on this windless night, its strawberry blonde sheen reflected by his Coleman lamp.

His surprise took over, and his practiced lines of friendliness melted away.

“You scared the living shit out of me… Who the hell are you?”

A sweet voice responded containing an incredibly comforting warmth that could make the tenseness in his shoulders disappear.

“I could ask you the same thing. This is my spot”

The smile accompanying the end of her statement felt like that connection he had been missing out on. That longing he had been searching for had been found. Or rather, it found him.

“Would you mind if I enjoyed it as well?”

“Not at all.”

The oddest events followed. This stranger who for all she knew was approaching a man on the run for murder, laid down next to that man and looked at the stars above. A connection formed in that silence, more beautiful than words can express, and it was likely the absence of words that led to it. This infinitely long moment seemed impossibly short.

Anxiousness took hold. Arms wrapped bodies. A blur of comfort and pain washed around a dizzying black room of wood. The reek of dry rot and damp hay became prominent and pungent. Lights from the sky flickered every which way until the earth stood still.

When the earth found its balance, Shane found that he could not find that which he had been looking for. That which he had thought he had found. The beautiful girl with strawberry blonde hair. He was at the store, so she should’ve worn a name tag. But he can’t remember the name. Was it Thomas? No, that was the man who sold him the almost-Nutella. Why would she be wearing a name tag. I met her in this barn, not the store.

She was gone and he couldn’t find out how or why.

Seconds passed at the same rate as an hour, finally she appeared again and his shaking stopped. He felt hot all over but somehow her comforting warmth soothed him. It was like being in a deep slumber while being awake. This is what it is to be at peace. That tension is gone, the tension in his back. The tension in his heart, the hands pulling its strings cut off at the wrist. The tension in his mind was rubbed smooth, his gray matter slurped up and spit back into his head in a better arrangement. This is peace. This is euphoria.

Words came out that couldn’t even be felt, like a robot in the back of his brain made him do it.

“I missed you.”

Those sweet lips he’d thought he’d kissed, but could never with chivalry intact, made way for diction to retort after a mild chuckle.

“What do you mean? I’ve been here the whole time.”

In his heart he knew it. She had been there the whole time. He rolled over to face her as she faced the stars. He closed his eyes for a brief moment, and when they opened he felt that emptiness again. She was still there but different. Her smile faded.

“You can’t love me you know.”

Tears hotter than the sun burned his cheeks.

“You simply CAN’T. It’s impossible for you and you know it. You pretend… You pretend that you love someone, that someone can love you. It’s a joke.”

That sweet chuckle became nothing short of a cackle.

His cheeks were melting and burning, somehow physically and chemically changing.

“You don’t know me.”

“How could I not?”

The reply stumped him. How couldn’t she. He knew it was true but could not realize why. He took breaths in a sad and unfruitful attempt to regain that euphoria but that tearing and ripping inside is all that was left. The more air he let in, the more the rot of the barn seeped into his lungs and infested his body. The rot breathed in his insides and the barn breathed at him. It heaved slowly and heavily as it moaned and creaked.

He knew she was causing it and he wanted it to stop. So she beckoned her to leave but she just wouldn’t stop cackling. The pitch was so high it could crack and eardrum and it felt like it did. He rolled over and screamed for it to stop but it got louder and gave way to the loneliness. She was there but she couldn’t fill his emptiness, instead she dug the hole deeper and deeper with her spade shoveled cackle.

He pushed and tossed and the cackling grew distant below the loft.

It started to fade and he knew something horrible had happened. When he tried to look over the loft into the corral, he realized there was no loft to look down from as he was below it. Lying beside her as he would endlessly throughout the night until the two became one. The feelings of loneliness and euphoria, joy and remorse, longing and connection all started to fade.

Everything started to fade and he could hardly understand why.

All he knew was that the cackling stopped, but he couldn’t locate that strawberry blonde hair. He could hardly locate himself. On his search for something, he became nothing.

If such a thing as a soul does exist, it left his body that night in search of a better place. Perhaps a place where he could find a connection, or maybe wherever that girl of his dreams had went.

If such a thing as a soul does exist, then he might chase after that girl forever, because he would never find her unless he would look the place he never would. In himself.

Somewhere deep down inside he knew it, that someone like that, a circumstance like that, could never exist beyond his dreams. And this was the truth, however it wasn’t a dream. She was him, and they were gone.