Last Rights

Originally written during the blackout

The road to Hell was supposed to have been paved with our good intentions. On the road to recovery, you are given the unique opportunity to find out just how each and every one of those intentions failed.

As we have begun before, as we continue to believe, there was an idea of a James McLaughlin. Something abstract, something illusory. We have told this story, and we tell it here again. Somewhere along the path this idea was left behind with the ghosts of the days that have long past.

I would recognize the landscape had changed, that nothing was going to be the same. In that moment, the weight of the world was lifted from my shoulders as I looked out across the runway towards Lantau Island. The guilty had been set free. It was all just a dream.

Remember when you were young, you shined on like the sun.

I was fiery and unpredictable, intoxicated by my own novelty act, wearing thin on patience and living out every fantasy as if our days had already been numbered. The last story before I left the West, and the last story before I left the East, one in the same. Goodbye Farewell Amen. Although neither one was intended for the same audience, they resonated to that end. Serving as bookends to the most improbable stories that should never have been. And just like that, Jay was gone.

The Battle of Evermore told the stories of dissolution and redemption. From the hallucinations that followed from my grandfather’s death, to the machinations of my political endeavors, to the chaos that surrounded those numbered days of Kansas and the train wreck that was the summer of the Bar exam. We followed the stories of those lost in translation moments on the dark side of the moon, the rebirth of a hero everyone had come to know, the rise of the lawyer and politician on a grand stage, space monkey, a blessing way, fight club redux, the American psycho, Insomnia, Cloud Nine, always the Annex.

Then that day had come...where the stories had been told and everyone was supposed to live happier ever after. I was done with what I was brought here to do. Everyone on both sides of the ocean, I could have faded away forever knowing that they were all going to be taken care of.

Whether I boarded that plane, or disappeared once again, none of it mattered to me. This was the way it had to be. I was blessed with the opportunity to play the role of a lifetime, and I brought the house down.

The audience would erupt in celebration; the curtains came down on a beautiful story, the house lights came up and the band played on into the night. Our story had ended with that lasting moment in the airport; there was to be no encore, no contingency plan to rest our assurances on. For what I have done, everything that we have fought through together, Hong Kong was to be the grand stage for such a lasting performance. I went to Hong Kong for one final adventure; I never planned on coming back.