Karma Killer

Again, hard to really blame them. It was more an act of generational difference than anything. I don't think my siblings hate me or anything like that, I just don't think I come to mind much at all. When we have family reunions, they have very little to say to me directly. Most of the conversation is - was - with Ruby, to be honest. I don't have that much to say to them either, because I have no shared experiences with them to build on. Forever in their minds I was an irritating twelve-year-old they wanted to avoid, and as we got older, that impression never wavered.

My mom clearly wanted a girl, and she evidently got one. So why the hell am I here? Because I'm the worst kind of oops baby. My mother was sterilized after my sister was born, and then I came along six years later, because it clearly wasn't done right. A fact I should point out was gleefully imparted to me by my elder sister on my sixteenth birthday, because she was pissed off with me over something trivial. What a great surprise for parents now in their mid-forties to have yet another child on the way. I'm sure they were overjoyed.

By the time I came along, my parents were tired. Oh, I was loved, after a fashion. But the reality is that they'd already done five kids, and they weren't really in the mood for another one. Not with everything that came with it. And who can blame them? I wasn't planned, wasn't particularly wanted, was nothing special. I was just there.

I was left to my own devices a lot. In some ways it was great. I didn't have curfews or wasn't told No a lot, but on the down side, I wasn't told much of anything. I existed, they did the bare minimum they had to and we all just drifted along. I wasn't so much brought up, as given a place to stay with some relatively nice people who were somewhat present. I got birthdays and Christmas but not much interest, or physical affection or love. I wasn't given lectures on right or wrong, or had much interest displayed if I did something or was interested in something. There was no help with homework, and no chance of the birds and the bees conversation.

And I know for a fact that's where it started. If I wasn't worthy of love from my parents, who were supposedly duty bound to love me, why would I be worth it from anyone else? When the one set of people who were supposed to always love you just... didn't, for whatever reason, then why the hell should I expect it from anyone else?

They were there, they were involved when they had to be, but as mentioned, they were tired. Six kids takes it out of you, and it's hard to really be too down on them for that. They just weren't willing and able at that point in life, - their late forties/early fifties, - to take all the stresses and attention required that raising a kid right really needs, when they hit their formative years. Not after the personal cost in raising five already, and now another one? I don't hate them for that, or feel even that ambivalent about them. They did the best they could at the stage of life they were at. I was there at the wrong time and I got short changed because of it. That's life. It's not like I was special for that.

But that all just reinforces the worthlessness of my own view of myself. For whatever reason I didn't get love, or what I even thought love was supposed to be, it just reinforced the belief that I didn't deserve it. That it wasn't mine to inspire in people. My Karma was just the worst imaginable. If I believed in re-incarnation, I would wonder what I did in a past life to deserve this one?

Then you look around at the world and you see that most people don't really deserve it. That there are that many happy people around, that they find someone to love who loves them back, that's the real miracle.

So yeah, my parents I think helped start me on this journey, or at the very least, didn't take me off it, so they deserve some of the blame, but as mentioned, I don't feel bad at them for it. It's not like they set out to make my life miserable. My own existence in the way it came to be made that happen. I am an accident of time and unfulfilled expectations. It's nobody's fault; I can't point a finger and blame, it just is what it is. Like I said, sometimes - most times - depression is not rational. The real problem is that once this kind of thinking gets hold of you, it permeates through everything. It builds on itself, and becomes who you are, rather than a small strand of you.

Okay, so enough navel dwelling on the why.

Practically, I knew enough by the time I hit puberty of how to hide it. I did some experimenting with drugs to see if that could mask it. Weed was hit or miss. It either sent me hyper or down deep below, so I learned to avoid that pretty quick. Speed was just weird. I tried LSD once, but when the Borgified Care Bears threatened to destroy the world, I decided that was not the solution to my issues.

The weird thing that had the most practical effect? Not Xanax or any of that stuff, no, it was Vitamin D. I have no idea how but it leveled me out a LOT. I still don't get the how of it, but the way I once tried to explain it to someone was it like a bridge between peaks and troughs of the waves that are depression.

Usually when the wave hits bottom, I go with it, as though I'm a boat, bobbing around on the surface of the water. It gets so bad I couldn't even muster up the effort to get out of bed. But with daily Vitamin D, it was like there was a bridge between peaks. The troughs and low waves are still there, and still affecting deeper me, just not the surface me. I was able to function far better and be able to get out of bed and go to work and at least not be a miserable bastard to everyone. I was less, well, happy is not really an adjective I would ever use to describe my state of mind, but l was not my usual destructive self when these bursts would happen, over three or four days. I was also not visibly destroyed by them either.

Like I said, functional depressive.

I learned a lot about how to mask true reactions during my puberty and mid teen years. When I was in college, I likened it to sociopaths and psychopaths learning what social interaction looks like, what responses are expected, and learning to simulate that. You don't feel it, it isn't an instinctual reaction, but you can learn what is expected and provide it and most people are not at all really interested in your emotional state anyway. As long as you are in the ball park of expectations, most people will fill in the blanks of your response regardless. They are usually too busy thinking about what they think you think anyway. I wasn't sitting there plotting to kill anyone or blaming them for my self image, just... I wasn't getting much out of life at the same time. Compliments bounce off me. Any time someone has something nice to say, I can pick it apart and either come up with reasons why they have to say what they said, or I take it apart and destroy the reason for them saying it in the first place.

I should interject and say that life is not always this bad. This is the extremes of my depression, and I worked very hard to just not pay attention to it. To fill my life with things to do, duty, work, other stuff, so I didn't have time to pay attention and just wallow in the black void that is my core. As I said, I have a lot of things I do to mask the inner turmoil. I recognized early on that I needed distraction; constant and unrelenting, that meant something to other people. Commitment, when made to others who absolutely need it, is a huge distractor and focuses attention on them and not me. So that's what I did. Volunteered at a soup kitchen. Did meals on wheels whenever I could. Managed an Older Brother / little Brother group. Stuff like that. Things that took time out of my day that Ruby or work didn't occupy, so when I woke up in the morning, I would be thinking about tasks for the day instead... anything else. Idle hands are the devil's workshop, as the saying goes. For me, it's more like Idle hands are the devil's drowning pit of despair. Doesn't have quite the same ring though.

Robin Williams once said that those who spend their lives making other people laugh are the ones who need to laugh the most on the inside. I totally get what he means. Like most actors are people who need others' validation for their own self-worth, or as mentioned, comedians are the ones who use humor to mask their own insecurities, I tried to fill out my life with work, in a commitment to other people so I couldn't let them down. I didn't have the time to sit in my own metaphorical shit; other people wouldn't eat if I didn't get up and go do what needed to be done.

I did have a lot of moments wanting to end things, I'll be honest. There were many times when I fantasized about finding a way to end it. Never splashy or to try and make a statement; I had literally nothing to say to anyone regarding that. Just to remove myself from life, because clearly it wasn't meant for me. But, to pile on the self-loathing, I couldn't find a way to do it that didn't involve pain. Sure, there are pills you can take, but they both take time - and I did NOT want to sit there, knowing I was about to go slowly but surely, - and also, I had no access to them. I didn't want to take risks with it not working, and I didn't want there to be a time duration, so no head-in-the-gas-oven or hooking up the exhaust to the car, or anything like that. I did think about hanging, but I don't know if you know this, but the last thing you do when you hang yourself, is shit yourself. The bowels let go. What a delightful way to go. Yeah, no.

So I didn't even have the courage to end my life when the idea came up. What a great way to enforce the worthlessness of myself. Too cowardly to even do that. I justified it on the surface as 'having a strong character', but the reality I knew inside was that I was just a coward, to go along with all the other character flaws I possessed.

However, there were great moments too, don't imagine there weren't. It wasn't all doom and gloom, like it sounds. Ruby kissing me on the cheek that first time, when we were alone. I was astounded and confused that anyone like her would ever want to kiss someone like me, but still, even with my issues, I walked home on air that day. Her actually saying yes when I asked her to marry me. Her walking down the aisle in her amazing and sexy wedding dress. The day I was asked to take over, once Harry had announced he was retiring. There were very definitely good days and I did know what fleeting bursts of euphoria felt like. Just never felt that ongoing "it's a good day" thing that other people seem to have. Hell, I don't even know what it's really like to be very stable. The best I can say is that I know what it's like to not constantly be in a pit of despair. It's more that I know how it can be to have that absent for a while, than any other kind of prolonged feeling. Sometimes 'fake it till you make it' can kinda work. You can fool yourself for a while that you aren't the worthless piece of shit you really know yourself to be. But it doesn't take much to pop that bubble, let me tell you.

The only time I ever really felt at peace was when it was just Ruby and Me. Alone, no one else to take our attention, just the two of us doing Sunday morning chores or whatever. I still to this day do not understand what she sees in me, but... she was there. She chose me. And that was enough to keep the worst of it at bay.

It's harder with someone who really knows you, though. With Ruby, it was very hard. I made a point, early on, of explaining that I had some social problems, that I didn't always recognize cues and what the response was, so sometimes I may come across disingenuous. And to some degree, that was true. I just never explained where it came from.

Ruby was my salvation. In every sense possible.

She loved me. I had no idea why, but I believed it. In my soul. It made me worth something, even though I wasn't. Yes, I get the contradiction there. I think, on deeper reflection, it was that she made me worth something, even though I wasn't intrinsically? I dunno. Who really understands all the intricacies of depression?

Suffice to say, what you are seeing there is hope. I didn't ask too deeply about why, because I was deathly afraid that I'd learn something that would shatter me if I did. That's the problem with hope. When you have it, you'll do anything to protect it, even lie to yourself.

When you know in your deepest black void how worthless you are, that you really have nothing to offer that is of value to anyone, when someone makes you believe that they care, that you matter to them, it literally is like the gasp of air after being underwater for tens of minutes.

I still knew I was a worthless piece of shit, but she didn't know that, and it became important to protect that belief. She thought I was worth something. And she was important because she was just... everything. So I had to protect that erroneous belief with everything I had. It was wrong, but it kept her around and that made life worth it for me. Not because it fulfilled me - although it was the closest thing I would ever come to it -, but because it fulfilled her. She was kind to me. She made love to me. She laughed at me, but in a nice way. With me, rather than at me. It made me feel less shit about the world in general. I could ignore my own issues and concentrate on making her happy, and that definitely helped my own spirit. I could put my situation to one side and concentrate on her, and a raising sea rises all boats, right? Sure did for me, confused metaphors aside.

Now you start to get an idea of why I was in that car, doing what I was doing, right?

Long winded way of saying I had put her on a pedestal, and when she fell off it the entire world with her.

When the cops told me she had died, and then informed me of the circumstances, well... not only was she gone, so not there for me to concentrate my happiness on, but it just reinforced every belief I had about myself since before puberty. In spades. Proof positive.

She was having an affair, so I evidently was not enough. She'd finally seen through the façade, and understood what a worthless piece of shit I was, and went to find someone who could actually make her happy. Clearly. To the point of where it put her in danger and killed her. She wanted away from me that much. And who could honestly blame her?

And she wasn't there to deny anything or clarify anything, not that I'd have believed her if she had been. It was all too accurate in the reinforcement of my own self view. I should have seen this coming. I should have understood that this was inevitable. How could it not have been? But no, I stuck my head in the sand like a good little Ostrich, trying to have something I so evidently didn't deserve. I even knew it at the time, but my hope overruled my brain. And look where it got me.

So being here, in this moment with this conversation at the moment of death, well, can you understand why I react to it the way I am? It's a last-ditch effort by my own brain to try and make myself less unworthy than I really am. It's a last gasp of rationality over deep set knowledge, before the end.

And it's very obvious, too. Like I said, I'm not stupid. I can see things as they are.

Obviously, my instinctive reaction was to just avoid the question entirely because if she was right about the rules, all this would spill out. And that would just make me even more pathetic than I already knew I was. Then she'd know it too. I couldn't bear that.

And guess what? Those rules she mentioned? They were true. Because out of my mouth it all spilled anyway. Everything I've just mentioned, nothing was left out. Apparently the act of considering it meant it was spewing out of me, so she could know exactly what a loser she married.

I explained how I saw myself. What I knew in my core to be true. The absolute nihilistic and fatalistic view of the world I had. How I thought of myself, our relationship, what it meant to me, how it propped up my own sense of self. I just droned on and on, in a flat monotone, detailing all of it. My past history, my own conclusions, my fears, all of it.

She sat there, mouth slack, eyes filling with tears as I went into it. I held nothing back, told her it all. I guess there was really was something to those rules after all.

She didn't interrupt once as I laid it all out. I looked her in the eye the whole time, explaining how worthless I was, until I met her. How she and our relationship was the bedrock of my existence.

In the end, I ran out of words, and ended with a lame, ".... So yeah. That's it, in a nut shell."

And then I took a massive drink. Thirsty work, this being honest.

I should have been way more shaken. Surprised, even, that I could tell her these things. She'd mentioned the rules and here they were, being enforced. Score one for my subconscious; it keeps itself consistent, I'll give it that.

I'd just verbally vomited my innermost self, all the things I'd kept from everyone for so long, all the things at the root of my personality, to a dead individual, in my... conscious, subconscious, who the hell knew? And I wasn't depressed, or massively upset or anything about doing so. I was more just curious about how she'd take it.

Perhaps it was all things I should have said when we were alive. Probably. Well, too late now.

And she didn't disappoint. She sat there, shaking her head again and again. Tears slowly forming at her eyes, her expression getting more and more distraught as I went into detail about how I saw the world, myself in it and everything else that came with it.

When I was done, she just sat there, doing her best stunned expression. She just stared at me, tears streaking her face, shaking her head sadly.

"How did I not know this?" she uttered to herself, after visibly trying to process this. Then her eyes flicked at me angrily. "How could you not tell me? I mean, I knew there was something dark inside you, all the moods and stuff told me that, but... this? This..." she was at a loss for words to describe what I had just explained. I didn't blame her. I often was too.

I sighed, and decided to answer her last question, because even though it was rhetorical, - she was clearly talking to herself there, it did deserve an answer.

"Ruby..." I started, trying to find the right words. "Here's the problem. If I had told you those things, would you have married me? I mean, I'd had to have told you before we were married for it have value, yes? For you to make that decision to marry me? Can you honestly say that you'd have looked at me the same way after I told you all that? That you'd still have decided to marry me?"

In this situation, the rules went in my favor, because she couldn't protest that 'of course she would'. She couldn't lie. Instead, she just stared at me, tear-faced, saying nothing because we both damn well knew it was true.

"So, was it fair of me to not tell you? Well, probably not. But there was only one way that conversation ended. And as for not telling you afterwards, well, again, look at it from my point of view. You'd have known you were lumbered with me, and also, and this is important. This. Is. MY. Problem." I punctuated each word with a finger jab, making special emphasis on the 'My' word.

"This isn't your problem to fix, Ruby. This is my issue. I have to deal with it. And I was, just by... being with you. Add to that the fact that I absolutely did not want to dump my personal issues off as your responsibility. And you'd have taken it that way. If I'd explained to you that I was with you because you made me worth something, then that puts all that responsibility onto you. You suddenly know you are the root of my own emotional stability. And who wants that? You'd never be able to argue with me or tell me to fuck off or any of the things you need to do to be an equal partner, if you knew what was going on inside me. Don't bother to argue. We both know that's true," I said harshly, slapping the table for extra emphasis. It wasn't like I hadn't been over and over this in my own head over the years.