LostCause

My brother wrote this.






Published
by Kenny Weaver (8/7)
Everyone knows everything you ever told anyone. You try not to tell anyone. You write your secrets down in a book. You tell them to your pen, who tells them to your paper, who tells the world. It’s a cycle. People don’t want others to know their secrets. Yet, after their demise, someone always sells the rights to publish their journals for a couple hundred grand. John Jackson’s Journals: Opened. Jack Johnson’s Diaries: Revealed. It’s unavoidable.

If someone gives it enough time, he can find out anything about you. Your privacy and your wishes are thrown aside and its time for you to reveal your sins, your fears, your intimate secrets. People will know what was going through your head as you fell apart. They will know the final thoughts crossing behind your eyes as you crashed towards the earth. Your own personal black box. Now we can figure out your flaw. Now we can understand why Engine 3 burned out and sent you tumbling in a twisting free fall toward the harsh ground, which , in respect, sent your soul bounding back toward the skies with the gods.

I am Joel. I died in 1998. That’s all anyone should know about my life. It was my life, was it not? My life belongs to me, or at least it should, but I have found that once you die, your life no longer belongs to you. It’s your girlfriend’s to control. Your wife’s. Your mother’s. In my short, tragic life, I had many secrets, many lies, many deceits. My way of coping with them was to write them down in what I thought were my private journals. I never thought once about the day that I would die and they would be fair game to the first person to stumble upon them. My life written down. Please, read my life and tell me what you think. Judge me. Soon, everybody will have their assessment of my life. So, please, tell me what you think.

It’s been five years and six months since my demise. The act of dying, in case you’re wondering, is as tough as anything you can ever imagine. Dying isn’t as splendid as you’d think it would be. Television and movies glorify death too much. There is no choir of angels. No light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve never seen the infamous tunnel. It’s just me and death. The actual act of evacuating your soul is gut-wrenching. It hurts. My body may have gone limp, but my entire being and soul was contracted into a howl of energy. Imagine if a piece of paper had feelings and you ripped it in half, and that’s me. Then, I’m just there, looking at my dead body, and for a second it was comforting. I have no form. I’m not like a casual ghost you encounter in your run-of-the-mill movie store. I’m a breeze. I’m a presence. Oh, and before you ask, there is no heaven , no hell, no God, no Satan. There’s just me and death.

It’s amazing how much you learn about people that you thought you knew after your death. You can really see people’s reaction. People’s response to your death. Did they really care? I guess we’ll find out soon. We’ll see what your life meant to Sally. To Jane. To Mary. Most of the time you realize that their sentiments were false. Sally wasn’t as sincere as she made herself out to be. Jane fibbed. Mary his behind her untruths. Picture your costume at the Halloween party, picture your face behind a mask, and that’s these imposters. Take me for example. Leading up to my death, I was in love with a beautiful woman, Tobia. I thought she loved me and if I would ever pass away, she would mourn. I wrote all this in my journal. I wrote all my sappy, embarrassing thoughts in my journal. Recorded them in my black box. Tobia, however, was your run-of-the-mill Sally, Jane or Mary. Because of her fake sincerity, her mask of love, she’s now pretending to mourn while she sells copies of my life in hardback. $24.05 for my life. Put a price on life. That’s what she did. She didn’t care. At least my love for her will be frozen in time in the pages of my confessional. At least I can fake too.

After death, my uncle was one of the first people I saw through. He was rather open with his feelings. “Damn kid was always annoying anyway!” Good. Turn to page 231, Uncle. See how I really felt about you. Let me quote it for you.


January 14, 1998


My father’s brother, Joe, needs to rot in a grave. All he does is leach off this family. Falsehoods leak out of him. Last year, when his wife died, we kindly took him in during his time of need. Never once have I heard him utter a “thank you.” Yesterday, he lied to my father and told him he had dropped the check for the rent in the mail. He never did and my father maybe evicted. I wish he would die … soon.

What do you think, Uncle Joe? Do you approve of my analysis of you? Read and enjoy. When he went and spend the twenty-five bucks for a copy of my life, he read that part and was so angry he went into cardiac arrest. Oh well, he deserved it. This is my final thoughts of you, Uncle. Eat your heat out.

Because of Tobia’s decision to publish my life, my boss now knows I was stealing from the store. It was genius really. I would get my friend to come in to “purchase” a few DVD’s. I would ring it all in and then void it out of the system. He would give me a few twenty’s and I would give him back the same amount in small bills. Give him a voided receipt. There you go. Away scott free.

But the problem, you see, is that I had no problem with my boss. He was generally decent to me. He too, however, went out to his local book store and purchased my life. After reading the sections of my journal dealing with the thefts, he hunted down my accomplice to confront him about it. While meeting there with him, he was shot dead. His life now reflects mine. Me and my uncle and now my boss, dead, due to the mistakes of Tobia.

So, here we sit, three down, the world to go. My life, the truth, is ruining people. My secrets make me an angel of death. I am a killer. Picture John Wayne Gacy, and that’s me. Picture Ted Bundy, and that’s me. But I don’t feel regret for these deaths. I’m only an indirect killer. I blame Tobia. The faker. The fraud. The liar. She is the reason all this is happening. She had to bet he greedy one. It was my life. Not hers. And now everyone is dying because of what was past and forgotten. Pictures exhuming someone’s dead daughter, a murder victim, just to prove she was raped before her murder. Picture the look on her mother’s face. Picture the hurt and anger in their eyes for their remembered pains, and that’s my victims.

Tobia, however, is yet to open and read my book. Good. She doesn’t know that I was in love with her. She know I said it. But she has yet to read all my secret thoughts about how I felt. The true love. The way she made me feel. I was poisoned by her guile. If she doesn’t read it, there’s always that lingering thought in her head that maybe I truly despised her. That’s the way it should be. People shouldn’t know everything you feel about them. Just ask my uncle and boss.

But now, as I tell this story, Tobia is opening my life for the first time. She’s exploring my mind. My psyche. Listening to my black box. I can see her eyes grow wide as she’s poisoned with her guilt. She knows she shouldn’t have done this. She understands her wrongdoings now. And, as she reads my final passage, her breath slips away into a gasp, and then no more.


September 4, 1998


To Tobia,
Tonight, I have decided I’m truly going to test you. I’m going to steer my car into another at about eighty miles per hour. Don’t call it suicide, this is more of a test. I’m going to leave the journals out for you to find. If you publish them, I will truly know that you didn’t really love me. That you wanted to leach off me. And so, my sweet Tobia, the test begins. But know, that I did always love you and always will.