rudyard o'connor [d6; fin]

We were never close.

When they had asked me to speak at his funeral; when they had asked if I would do the honors that needed to be done by someone else who understood the struggles of the common youth, I had said no.

I did not know him, and even if I did I would have refused the offer, for his parents had turned his death into something that left a bitter taste on every tongue who knew the true nature of the situation.

They had started sifting through his things—had found the suicidal tendencies and the obvious signs, symptoms, and sequestered calls for help only after he had been returned home in a wooden coffin with corners that were not aligned properly.

But it seemed that now nothing truly found its place; never truly understood the meaning of belonging or home or family or genuine or conscious thought or anything in between.

If I could find the middle ground, maybe I could put faith in false hope.

But then again, I suppose it didn’t matter much what I did because I don’t think anybody really missed him, anyhow.

If they had missed him, his name would not be left unsaid since his burial; his gravestone would not remain unmarked and unvisited—I was guilty of the latter crime just as much as anyone else who carried the name.

I suppose he was not missed because he had been gone far longer than two years’ time. Wyatt O’Connor had been missing for years; silent and absentminded and some sort of speculated form of unstable. His absence compared between the points of then and now showed such a minuscule differentiation that unless one analyzed his movements with a sharp eye, the only contrast they would find would be the physical beat of his heart.

God knows his mind had been gone long enough to cause his parents to leave the burial to the neighbor boy, five dollars and a promise of a favor exchanged down the line had him whistling the tune of the gravedigger faster than anyone could protest such nonchalance.

If I had been given the option, I don’t know that I would have done anything differently.

But even if he had been given a marked tombstone or an elaborate funeral or even a response that elicited emotion, Wyatt O’Connor would still be dead.

We’d all eventually be dead, no matter who loved us or how deeply we left our mark upon the small area of ground we managed to tread.

If I shared the same thought process as any other driven human, I suppose this should concern me much more than it does. The outcome of events has never been a priority—everything happens and sometimes the end result is not what is expected but everything does end, and there’s nothing interesting about that. There’s no question as to whether the sun will set or whether every person I have ever managed to meet will end up as buried bones.

The interesting thing is what happens in between.

Suspended by the pillars of birth and death that mark the beginning of all that has existed, currently exists, and will exists lingers the word if—a marking of circumstance, a signal of shift and the realization that nothing is truly under our own control.

Terrifying, yes.

Enthralling, indeed.

Everything hinging on the choices made from one second to the next, from one thought that shifts with a passing wind and catches in the wrong mind at the right time.

I have redirected my own path in more than one instance simply in the time it has taken to scratch these thoughts down upon paper.

If makes tomorrow obsolete, makes the future a period instead of a question mark— tomorrow will always come, but the how is yet to be determined and remains still indeterminable if the idea is lingered upon for far too long.

It always is.

The people who plan are the people who die young— as a general rule of thumb either from a heart attack or by falling victim to the circumstances they’re trying to control. The strain it puts upon the mind and heart are far too great for any ordinary human to bear.

I don’t think that Wyatt O’Connor ever died at the hands of the boy from eleven, if he had, I think that for some reason, he would have received a proper funeral.

No, I believe that Wyatt O’Connor died at the hands of his own power, at the hands of a circumstance he was finally beginning to see as transparent. Besides, when one realizes the inevitability of everything that has, is, and will be, what more can be put into the mind?

No, he died because he got too close, brushed his knuckles upon the castle walls of certainty and order and consciousness. If this was so, I suppose you could attribute his depression to this, which would be a feat in itself, for he could then claim to have been clear-minded far longer than any other human I’ve met. Admirable in a sense but despicable in the same, for many could claim to want what he found but dispose of it as soon as it was claimed. The true power that rests in understanding grows exponentially by erasure of the word if. I suppose this is partially why we never grew close; why we never spoke except in exchanges of single sentences—he terrified me. I saw the face of a dead man walking and I ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction.

My mother tells me that I should have been more like him; that I should think clearly, that I should focus on hindsight rather than narrowing my field of vision to that which existed in the moment the words left her tongue, but for god’s sake, we’ve all seen what happened to Wyatt O’Connor.

If I was to die today, I’d at least want a proper funeral.