I’m Always Watching

I’ve always been watching. If not through a window, then through the eyes of my soul. Watching as each day goes by. And when the darkness would fall, my dreams would continue for me.

What have you been watching?

Him.

Your next door neighbor…. Charles Wilson?

Charles Emmett Wilson, with two t’s. No. Not him, as pleasing to the eye that he is, I am not watching him.

You’ve enjoyed his company in the past, haven’t you?

Charles? Yes, I have. He’s been a most agreeable distraction, but he knew I was preoccupied. As much as he liked the way the sun hit my hair and the sound of my laughter, he was never able to connect with me. A pity. If this had been another time and place, Charles Emmett Wilson and I…

With two t’s…

…could have lived happily ever after. This is a kind of fairy tale, isn’t it? One written upon the pages in an old german hand.

The Brothers Grimm?

Yes, the Brothers Grimm could be recording my life. A silly notion, though, that gives one the illusion that none of this is real. You have to realize that what I tell you, as impossible as it may be, is no story told in the shadows. It is as real as the blood I hear flowing through my veins.

Is it?

Skeptics were once burned as witches beside the heretics they denounced. Listen carefully to me and ask the right questions or you’ll be like all the others who constantly scribble their notes and push their glasses up their noses with an air of superiority. I know precisely where I am at all times. My sight may be seeing what none of you do, but I also see what all of you do. If anything, you’re the ones who are in the dark and getting lost in the shadows. Not me. Now, ask what you really wish to know instead of leading me as a horse to water.

Who is he that you are watching?

He is the breath of a shadow that falls upon your path when you are uncertain. He is the chill of fingertips that brush your neck when you investigate the things that go bump in the night. He is the rush that overwhelms you when the black cat, her hair awry in indignation, comes through the door with a screech instead of the bogeyman. And finally, he is the reflection that you see in the mirror behind your own eyes. He is the one that gathers the sighs, the tears, the regrets, the anger, the curses, the blessings, the final moment before the heart is still.

Death.

You’ve stopped writing. Could it be that you think I may be speaking the truth in your presence? Have I finally gotten your attention?

What have you watched? Recently…

Three rooms down from mine. He was once a man whose hands brought magic to the world. His fingers upon the keyboard of a piano blessed his audiences with light and love until something within his mind broke as he rode across Europe. He witnessed something so terrible in those foreign lands; a cruelty of man against man, that he was unable to process what it meant. So harsh was the blow to his mind that he could no longer play his music. Day and night he would see the image of a soldier shooting a child in the street like an aged film playing over and over. Last night, when his tears streamed down his cheeks, the film was ended and your staff found him in the silence of the dawn, his face a mask of peace.

You could not know… it is impossible for you to know any of this.

There’s that word, impossible. Already your mind is closing, and look, you’re writing your notes once more. Give me your pen and listen. Open your mind instead of finding avenues of escape from my reality. I am only 27 years old, but I have watched him for twenty of those years and my mind remembers everything. Everyone that he has touched has also touched me and become a part of who I am.

And… you’re angry? Yes… angry that he has consumed…

NO! I am angered by fools like you that must dissect what you can neither see nor understand. I am content. I am fulfilled and thankful because I am helping him.

Helping? How?

His burden is a difficult one and it is one he has carried for more centuries than we are able to count. He chose me to share that burden because he knew that I would be able to bear it. Yes, I have wept. I have cursed God, but not for giving me something I could not embrace, but for waiting so long to give him release. Think, doctor, of all the lives in this place that you have seen end here. You remember each one, I know that you do, because it is reflected in your eyes. Now, multiply those lives by the largest number that you can conceive and you will have just the tiniest understanding of what he holds in his memories, in his soul.

And he’s been alone?

Utterly.

I would have been driven to madness.

As was he, almost. I watch him and share his burden and will do so for as long as I am able.

You worry about him.

I do. Someday he will come to me… I am like the sin-eater of old who when he died the burden fell to his cursed son to eat the sins of the father and all the sins that went before him. All that I’ve seen will return to him. I worry that will be the day that his mind breaks and his soul will be destroyed.

Then, what will happen to us if Death can no longer be?