Grand Design

And in the dark, blind depths of my despair did the senseless fragments coalesce into an aperture in which I could pass into. The realm I entered was but a place where the future manifest itself, formed from every experience I had ever endured and would ever occur. I can see my mother and father, intelligent, calculated and distant and my child self made confused and angry at their practical absence. I can hear them bemoan and fly into frenzies over the issue of finances all while their bank accounts bloat and grow fetid with disuse. This Future-Land is filled with shadows, echoes of everyone I have known and all that I took notice to. I see the girl I coveted in my youth, her memory so faint it is indistinguishable and unnerving in how little it resembles a human. I see my teachers, my coworkers, my family and the dead. The silhouettes of the friends I abandoned walk past, moving into the futures of those that gave to them the care and effort they deserved. As I move forward the echoes wane in frequency and the ambition materializes as a continuous stretch of light. I see the endless stress and work that I paid for with my youth, the opportunities I forewent in preference of my desire and the far away glimpses of the futures that would never be mine. I walk for as long as my lifetime would be. Years I see of the isolation, the inability to erect authentic human connection. I see the one I hurt so terribly, who chose to remain under my abuse until I ran away at last. At the end of my future is the conclusion, the central point where all possibilities and computations converge. As I look upon it I can see the experiences that branch from it and the numerous, proliferating realities that all lead to this singular event. I realize it was all predetermined the moment I was born. The moment I formed into what could be identified as I did so many routes flourish and yet every one of them ends here, fomented by the tides of tragedy, isolation, misery and anger, it was inevitable, it was crafted long before volition and autonomy had meaning. I did have agency, I was able to choose which route I took, but never would I escape the inexorable finale: a corpse that hangs upon the central tree, a corpse that looks back with my very eyes.