Mirror

Got a couple of new notebooks and am busy incorporating them into my — heh, heh — “system”. While in the process of that, I ran across an old hard-back journal I was keeping.

Apparently it was one of my high-output stretches (2018/19) since I’d filled the damned thing from one end to the other over the course of the single year. I have stretches like that. Anyhow, the last entry for the year was me talking about cleaning out old records and notebooks.

Very meta, yeah?

Included in THAT recorded chunk of cleanout was the following entry, presented here pretty much unedited. Anything I changed is in [brackets]:

[BEGINNING OF ENTRY]

12/28/2019 Saturday

So, for no apparent reason I decided to go through old [records of various kinds]. Which turned out to be a fairly horrible idea. The old records ran from 1983 - 1995.

Jesus what a shitty wad of years those were. Some new disaster in every month.

Going through the paperwork for one particularly egregious event, I was reminded of sitting in that hotel room in [City].

I had my pistol sitting on the nightstand next to the bed, unloaded, the bullets lined up like neat soldiers. I picked it up and stuck it in my mouth, just seeing what it was like. Then I carefully loaded the magazine. One round left over, the one to top off the magazine when a round was jacked into the [chamber]. I snapped the slide back and let it slam forward, charging the weapon. Then I took the magazine out and pressed the last round into it, watching the charged pistol on the nightstand, wondering if it was going to taste the same loaded as it had empty. I slammed the magazine into the weapon. Then sat with it in my lap running my fingers over it like a lover for probably 15 or 20 minutes while I drank my whiskey.

Then I picked it up and held it for a moment flat against my face and inhaled the sharp tang of machine oil and solvent. I could feel a shift somewhere inside - whether a click or a tear, I couldn’t say - and I stood and walked over to the desk chair where my holster was hanging. And I saw myself in the mirror across the hotel room desk with the gun in my hand. [ ] The mirror-me pointed the gun at me, the muzzle huge and black. As I stared at me across those sights, the sight-alignment as always perfect and machine-steady, I heard myself say impatiently, “Well, you sad-sack mother-fucker, make a decision. What are you going to do?” For some reason this made me laugh. [ ] I lowered the gun and snapped it into the holster.

“Fuck you,” I said, still out loud, “and fuck them. They aren’t going to win.”

And, long story short, they didn’t, and I did.

[ ]

I’d forgotten how bad it got till I ran across that ancient paperwork. Just a bit of a reality check. I am again reminded how lucky I am and how grateful I am to be here. That [was] my one time. The idea never crossed my mind again, except as a theoretical exercise in end-times death arrangement. Death doesn’t scare me, you see, never has, really. But I ain’t exactly looking for it, either.

One [City] hotel room ought to be enough for any of us.

[END OF ENTRY]

…and now here I am in 2021 being reminded of that night yet again. I don’t really need it today, but there it is. It occurs to me that this is why journaling can be a big deal. It reminds us where we came from, sometimes, and that stripped naked right down to the second we lived.

And we can shake our heads in bemusement and wonder, for good or ill, how that version of us ever existed.