Stranglehold

Originally written during the blackout

The hero dressed in white rode to the rescue of everything he held dear. Without hesitation or doubt, what had to be done was, and by the wayside there went the consequences.

Passionately, truly, I believed everything had been taken care of, and nothing was ever as certain as that idea; nothing could ever again stand in my way. Not language or culture, politics or religion, intelligence or bravery, I had it all under control, and everything was going to be right as rain once again.

Every ghost that chased me from one side of the world to the other, they were supposed to stay together on Lantau Island, where I laid them and all my great expectations to rest. Everything I had ever set out to accomplish I had. There was nothing left to prove to you. There was nothing left to fight on for.

“You can’t live without drama,” they would say to me as I found myself skirting by one misadventure after another. But take that fire, the red and the black; take all that away from me.

We were too busy putting the band back together to ever notice what had happened. The band had played on, every last one of them. It was you that had left them.

Endless days had turned into reckless weeks, but the weeks soon gave way to the disquieting months that followed. Our story tonight could never describe what these eight months have felt like; night after night, flailing away without a reason to get out of bed. After the brilliant lights I had seen, the mountains I had fought to tame, the legacy I created time and again, all roads led to that childish bedroom where I was hiding every minute of every day. Curtains drawn. Withdrawn. Laying on the floor like I had two years before, where our stories began, spiraling off the planet once again. There was never any hope; there was never a reason to expect tomorrow would be any different.

You have to understand there was nothing you could have done, whoever you might be. We had nothing left in common, no reference point, no connection to what was broken. We’re not the same, we’re different tonight.

My father was being crippled by spontaneous seizures.
My brother was missing, lost in the wind.
My youngest sister was starving herself to death.
My oldest sister was fighting jihadists in Iraq.

I put the weight of world on my shoulders, and there was nothing I could for any of it. Once upon time I was a force to be reckoned with, a weapon to take on the good and the bad, and I fought them all to my dying breath. The Castilian of Austin Texas. The alleyway of Lan Kwai Fong. But none of that seemed to matter to me anymore. I was still dreaming, nothing was what it seemed, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t wake myself up. Dreams move in slow motion when you’re running away.

This is not who I am.

There was an idea of a James McLaughlin. From that day then when these stories began, every decision I made was to make that idea a reality. And while we found ourselves in some unexpected and unforgivable situations, never once did that idea let us down. Could any of us have expected it was to end like this? Found dead at 27. Alone. Pigeon holed into an underclass of professional legal assistants. Every connection had been exhausted. Hong Kong had meant nothing. We were as irrelevant as ever.

I knew I had to find a real job. I knew I had to move out of the north shore. I knew I had to keep fighting even if all of our stories together had ended.

I knew I had to keep writing.

You deserve to know the truth. You are the only one that understands.

I resigned myself to this fate. For what I have done, this is my penance, and God knows what I have to atone for on that day then.