DYING TO BE PROVEN WRONG

It’s easy enough for me to imagine one day I’ll be lying on my death-bed, be it mattress, blanket and sheets or gutter and yesterday’s garbage, private floorboards or public sidewalk, on the green grass of some foreign field, or in a perfectly white room, riddled with plastic-tubing, attended by un-familiar white-coated professional phantoms, or utterly alone, gasping for breath, in my soiled underwear, this wizened withered old sod barely able to speak even to myself, or think anything other than this feeling that I was wrong, I’ve been wrong all the time.. I’ve lived a life unwell-lived, not loving enough not loved enough, too critical not critical enough, too selfish, too willfully detached from all the things that truly mattered, a life un-shared with living in general.. Too lazy, too busy pondering my own existence to ever fully embrace another’s… Now drowning in a nightmare of my own making, in a world so willing and able to carry on without me, to a purpose I’d failed to grapple with… Begging forgiveness from a God I refused to believe in.. Helpless, hopeless, teary-eyed, humorless, my life not even a good joke, nothing funny about it at all, no more wry witty retorts, no more audience to amuse… With only the end in sight, paying the final installment on my mortgaged existence, a futile flicker of a man who so rarely cared if anyone else lived or died, so long as it didn’t interfere with my own meanderings through my own journey to this destination that was already in place as soon as I was born.. I died at that moment, this moment no more no less momentous, no new mountains climbed, no new treasures discovered.. And where is the light at the end of this tunnel to lead me to a heaven I refused to believe in? Just a pile of garbage to be picked up in no mourning tide…And only now do I need to love so badly I would accept tenderness from anyone who cared to offer it to anyone but themselves…I should have been more careful of the truth, if only I’d known what the truth is, not what I suspected it wasn’t, not what I thought I knew it wasn’t, not what I preferred it shouldn’t be…And now I know what it is, it’s too late to do anything about it.. I should have believed, I should have believed, I should have believed in something other than my own doubts about everything….