A Man of Constant Sorrow

When I was alive, I thought I knew how to live. I indulged my appetites, culinary, sexual or otherwise with a ravenous zeal. For me, people were disposable. Things. They were to be used until the need or desire was fulfilled. Their thoughts, feelings, personal circumstances were inconsequential. Insignificant to the greater me. Work was as alien to me as the landscape of some distant planet. I basked in the glowing beneficence of patriarchal success. I worshipped no Supreme Being. People worshipped at the temple that was I. Especially women. Young women. My hair was blonde and I wore it unfashionably long. Women loved to run their fingers through my golden mane. Blue eyes burned with an electric, disconcerting sensuality. Or so I was told, by the more literate chippies that I wantonly bedded. I thought that was how to live. My ever self-gratifying existence. I was the Alpha and the Omega.

Then, the end did come.

It was in the form of a rain soaked stretch of lonely road on eastern Long Island.

A party. Expensive liquor. The promise of licentious coupling with a young woman. A girl, truth be told. The roar of the luxury S.U.V.'s engine pierced the still night air. Groping. Hands searching hungrily. A gasp. Breathe sucked in. A squeal born more of fright than of sexual titillation. The inevitable screeching of brakes. Impact. Metal scraping. Twisting. Crushing. The world violently revolving. Grayness. Fading. Black.

I awoke to a drab, one room apartment. The color of the room had surrendered itself to the bleaching gray. All I can see is black and white. I looked into the cracked bathroom mirror and the corpse that stared back did not have those electric blue eyes. They were dull and lifeless. My sense of taste was non-existent. Rib-eye steak tasted like stale rice cakes. I was as humorless and dreary as my surroundings. It took quite a long time to realize my fate. The road to redemption is a thorny, rocky, twisting path. My salvation lies over a distant horizon, a horizon I think I shall never see. The sins of my past have now caught up to me. And they like to visit me in the dark of night.

The dead like to do that.

The lives that I had shattered into millions of glittering pieces of pain and agony, sit by me or they walk aimlessly in my apartment. Bodies twisted. Broken. Limbs bent at horribly perverse angles. Blood.

Oh God.

I suspect He shall turn a deaf ear to my plight. Perhaps this is His Devine machination. His Grand Orchestration into what I am now. I never believed in God. I sure as hell think he does not believe in me.

I know scour the paper and news channels to catch a glimpse of someone suffering. Anguished. I am now a collector. I collect the grief and despair of tortured people by a single touch. Their pain and suffering is now mine, their burden eased. I go back to my hovel and I give birth to the torment. It manifests itself into an ungodly beast and I scream in sheer agony. And it howls with me. I do this. Again. And again.

I am a man of constant sorrow.

To the End of Days.