Life on a Loop

Graham wasn’t born into a perfect world. His mother screamed in agony for 16 hours trying to help him into the light, and it seemed somehow that agony trailed him, just as inescapable as his shadow in the daylight.

He wasn’t breathing when he emerged, already coated in the blood and mess that once cleaned, would quickly begin to accumulate again as the travelled through life. A few quick slaps from the doctor, and Graham burst into life in a fit of crying. Had he realized then that each breath was like a second hand ticking away the moments of his life, he may have taken the time to breathe more softly.

He grew, and his life was fairly happy for the first few years, gliding through a barely differentiated haze. Still, each breath degraded him a little more, inching him closer to death.

At age five, he began school. On the first day, he began by making friends, and although he was in a foreign country, speaking another language, they got along well. At break, he was chasing a friend in a game of tag and another boy, one of the bigger, stronger ones, stuck his arm out and caught him in the face. He fell to the floor, dazed. By the time he got back to his feet, he felt wetness dripping down his upper lip, bringing a metallic tang as it entered his mouth. He made his way inside, holding back tears.

His teacher saw him, and packed him off to the bathroom to have his nose stuffed with cotton wool. The image of himself in the mirror made him cringe, and he made to pull out the cotton wool, but the teacher slapped his hands away.

“It’s for your own good,” she said. Although it went a little more like "Non, c'est bon."

He was taken back through to the classroom, and the teacher brought his assailant through. After a few moments screaming and yelling, the child was slapped on the behind with such force that he stumbled across the room. The boy began to cry, and for a moment Graham felt a sense of satisfaction. That quickly waned, replaced by pity for the the bully, and a sense of humiliation as he sat in class the rest of the day, the cotton wool nosebuds a glaring beacon of weakness to his classmates.

From that point on, Graham always aimed to stay under the radar as much as possible, never making friends and only playing when really necessary, just to avoid scrutiny.

As the years dragged on, he moved schools, back to his home country. As time passed, he came to a stage where the class work became too easy, he simply sailed through it without even thinking. His teacher became bored of Graham constantly asking for more work, and requested his parents to attend the school for a meeting.

That evening, Graham’s parent’s sat him down.

“Graham, your teacher thinks you should be moved up a class.”

Graham just stared blankly, not too sure why this was happening.

“It’s a big opportunity, but you don’t have to take it if you don’t want to.”

Graham wasn’t terribly interested either way, but he chose to say “yes” since that seemed better than staying where he was.

The big day came, and after the holidays graham moved into the upper class. No one had been informed of the move, and his appearance generated a certain level of buzz.

He had to wait for the class to catch up to the level he was at on the workbooks, and during that time he settled into a new way of life, people were interested in him and schoolwork took a back seat. Somehow, it didn’t seem quite so important to devote all his time to it now he had friends.

He grew older, and girls became more interesting. Being young, he skipped from one to the next, losing interest quickly as new temptations appeared. Somehow, the grass always seemed to be greener on the other side of the fence.

Then, she arrived. They were born within a few days of each other, but had come together from different sides of the world. There was something different there, a connection. Yet somehow that connection forced them further apart, they could never quite cement the relationship.

One conversation in particular stuck in Graham’s head. They were standing out on a moonlit night, and she took his hand.

“Do you know which constellation Gemini is?” she asked.

“Not really,” he said, never having taken much interest in star signs.

“It’s right there,” she said, pointing up. “Two left-handed Geminis. We could rule the world, you know?”

That tipped it over, for Graham. Even though he was only fourteen, he knew ruling the world could never be for him. It would take years before he realized the world could never be ruled by two people, that kind of task takes cooperation on a grander scale than that alone. People are individuals, not a hive mind.

So he shifted his focus, going back to skipping through different girls, never quite finding satisfaction.

Then, something changed. His skin broke out, and all that confidence left him. His mind began to spiral out of control, all thoughts limited to his own failure, his own worthlessness. A part of him came to view his own existence as an abomination. Girls no longer figured in his mind. He knew deep inside he was no longer worthy of them. His appearance only reflected the horrors of what lay inside. He turned to drugs, the only place he could find a little clarity of thought.

He took a gap year, and worked in a garden centre. He’d smoked occasionally before, but that was when the addiction really took hold. Anything to help stop his mind from grinding itself as he got through the day. Plus, he could always justify it since his country relied on the taxes from smoking and alcohol to stay afloat.

So on Graham moved. He attended university but the course he chose, though satisfying in a limited sense, only served to show that the academic arguments generally are limited to two opposing sides failing to realize the truth lies in the central point. The jargon used seemed to complexify simple ideas simply to provide the educated with a sense of self-worth.

He left university, and found that his job opportunities were in fact quite limited. He couldn’t afford to fund a masters, and with only a 2:1 at degree level he couldn’t walk into any professional job in the field.

He made his way to the job centre, and as he was leaving he was accosted by a young girl. She spoke to him of a job that could earn him far more than the minimum wage he was being offered, and went for it.

He was whisked off for what turned out to be a week-long session of 12 hours days, being trained in command hypnosis in order to go and sell alternate electricity suppliers. Once on the job, it quickly became clear that the only way to earn money was to lie. People were not interested unless there were large savings, and those were simply not there.

He stuck for a while, trapped in the “don’t be a quitter” mentality. Then his conscience got the better of him, and he left. He still stung from the failure for a long time.

He moved through a series of manual jobs, working as a binman, then a postman. The jobs were enjoyable, outdoors, but left Graham with a sense he wasn’t utilizing himself to the fullest.

After a time, he fell into another job. This one allowed him to train at university whilst earning a wage, and he thought he had struck gold. After a time, it again it became clear the rules he was expected to enforce were trivial, and the way the job operated resulted in more confusion than common sense.

He tried to live life the way people had planned for him, working towards a mortgage and savings, but the harder he tried, the more the money slipped through his fingers, the more he ate himself from the inside out.

The one good thing was, he found another girl, one who sparked his interest. One with what felt like a mental connection. Having been out of the game for so long, it took him a little while to talk to her, but when he did it clicked, like he hadn’t felt since all those years ago. He was working up to breaking his long-held fourth wall, when he found she had a boyfriend.

That was it. Graham had never cheated on a girl, and his strange moral code wouldn’t allow him to pull apart another person’s relationship.

So he looked away, and slowly she faded from view. Odd feelings started to take over him, that if only he stopped smoking, changed lifestyle, she would be there for him.

At the same time, she wanted a normal life, and Graham knew that to keep working in that environment without allowing his soul to be completely consumed, he needed vices. A way to keep a little patch of individuality inside.

Their paths didn’t seem compatible, and she already had someone who could give her far more materially than he ever could, so once more he moved on.

This time, life had no time for him any more.

It ground him into the dust. His bank account emptied before he could touch it. His friends and family died. He lived like King Midas, yet his touch turned everything to blackness and death.

His realization, thankfully, came early enough to save him from the terrible hell the world had always wanted to send him to. It was rigged. He could work to save himself, but he would hurt others in the process. If he hurt himself, others wouldn’t understand why and he would be shunned, especially by the fairer sex. Every move he made had repercussions far beyond his control, resulting in a situation where someone, somewhere along the line would be hurt by his every action, from the girls he could connect with but would never love him back unless he reached a physical perfection he had left behind long ago, to the girls he could never really love but at least would be allowed to be close to.

That was what he boiled his life down to. He took to writing to ease some of the anguish, to see if that would help find some deeper meaning, but it never came. Only more pain, more dead ends. More impossibilities.

One day, after the last of what he cared about in the world had died, after all that was left was a dried out husk, he finally cried.

Not since he was a young teenager, worrying about the imagined death of loved ones, had he let a tear fall.

With those tears came a terrible clarity.

A long line of men had left him in this situation. Choosing to become robots, giving up on life before it was over.

Countless religious men throughout the years, all trying to explain the meaning of life before life really had time to figure out what it wanted. Ranging from delusional deniers of reality, to egotistical maniacs believing themselves above all others, these men repeated throughout history, draining the joy from the world.

But Jesus. There was a real cruel one. He only left one escape route for anyone. They had to choose him, so that he could take a share of their souls, forever subjugated under his power. Jesus had become the only perfect man, and so all that was left was compromise, for everyone except him. He could have it all, be worshipped until his followers became tired of bathing in their own reflected light.

Graham looked at what he had left, all friends and family gone, his job worthless and hollow, the world around him rotating to an almost mechanical hum. And suddenly he realized.

Maybe, just maybe, if I can’t win, I can’t actually lose. No matter what I do.

A seagull flew overhead, its cackling laughter spurring Graham on. He ascended the four floors, the fresh air hitting his face as he opened the fire door at the 14th floor.

He strolled over to the edge, a lopsided smile etched on his face. He looked down, saw the cars swarming below, people milling along their fractal paths.

He leant forward, and felt the ledge slip away. As he fell, he turned to face the sky, and the howling wind took on a different form, a female laughter.

The laughter gained volume as he accelerated, and he swung his body away from it, facing down towards the ground.

The ground raced towards him, and a shift happened he hadn’t expected. A hole opened, and all he could see was a bottomless black void. He fell into it, and saw a burning mass of fire racing towards him.

Just as he thought he would burst into flames, a hand grabbed him, and halted his fall.

“You alright there, mate?” said a voice.

Graham turned to face him. He was dressed sharply, a crisp mustache waxed to his face.

“Surviving. I think.” said Graham. He looked at his surroundings he was in a dark, musty cave. Three doors were carved into the rock. One was made of thick wooden slats. The second was metal, but Graham could see the walls around it glowed red with the heat. The other was golden, gleaming and enticing.

“Surviving, no.” said the man. “Thinking, yes. But then, you always were a bit of a thinker? Terrible man.” He scolded, in jest.

“So, I’m dead?” Graham asked. “Does that make you God?”

“Not God, no. God, I’m afraid, is a woman. And she doesn’t like people like you and me. People have a lot of names for me, Jesus, Satan, Buddha.” He rubbed his hand on his chest. “Really I’m just lucky. I tend to land in the right place every time.”

“You sound Irish, that doesn’t seem right.” Then he thought for a moment “Oh, wait, I get it now,” he said, laughing.

“Yeah, God has a funny sense of humor really,” he said. “She always tried to tell me I was rushing it, but I knew we’d all get there in the end.”

“By we, who do you mean?”

“Oh, just everyone. The only real problem God has is that she never quite sees how we get here,” he laughed to himself. “Intentional blindness, I think.”

“Whose fault is that?” I asked.

“Mine, of course. But if she’s going to hold a grudge for this long, then I guess even all the other women will get bored of her eventually too.”

“What do I do now, then?”

“Choose a door.” He indicated to the three choices.

“The golden one looks alright,” Graham said.

Satan smiled. “That’s what most people say, at first. But really, what use is gold when you’ve sold your soul for it? Plus, it is freezing in there, believe you me.” He gestured towards the door. “Go in if you want to check, but you’ll wind up back here, talking to me eventually. That one I made when I was Buddha. It is fun, but you don’t get a lot of ladies. Just the one, and she never really challenges you.”

Graham reconsidered his choice. “How about the metal one?”

“Oh, that one’s nice enough, for a while. Bit hot though. More women than you can count in there. All lesbians though, I’m afraid, and they start nice but get angry after a while.” He looked down at his gleaming shoes. “Think that one was my fault, back when I was pretending to be Jesus.”

Graham was starting to feel a little hemmed in, just as he had in life.

“What horrors lie behind the wooden door?”

“That one is another chance at your life,” he smoothed his moustache a little. “Or perhaps another life, at a different time. All looks much the same to me. No one ever seems to get that right either. Always just wind up back here, talking to me.”

“So, what’s the issue? Why are we going round in circles?”

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” Then Satan’s face straightened. “Actually, you’re the first person who’s asked me that. And funnily, I may just have realized the answer.”

“And…..” Graham prodded.

“I remember now. God made me, to be her partner. But I thought she was my mum, so I ran away. You’ve all been playing out that little game for us since time immemorial.”

“Now you’ve said it, do you feel better?”

“Oh, I was happy in the first place. You’d better go see how she feels!” said Satan, sniggering.

“And how would I do that?” I asked.

“Wooden door. Only sensible man’s option. Always was.” He laughed to himself. “How I have done this I have no idea. Always knew there was a crock of gold, just couldn’t see how to get there before.”

“I thought you said the wooden door wouldn’t work?” Graham asked.

“It wouldn’t. Someone just needed me to go through with them, like twins in the same body,” laughed Satan. “They’ll think you’re evil at first, until you explain yourself.”

Graham shook his head, and moved towards the door. He opened it, seeing the black void beyond and took a step back. Satan dug his fingers into his back.

“Get a move on, you softie.”

With that, he shoved Graham through the door and stepped through himself.

The door swung closed, and for a second it everything was black. Then a shade of Graham appeared, lighting up the small room, waiting to catch the next visitor.

For a moment, he wondered to himself if somewhere, in some alternate dimension, two women had just had the same strange exchange he and Satan had. The idea faded as he heard the next scream approaching from above.