Excerpt: Innocent Guilt? (Tentative Title)

Why always that one memory? It had been years, and his days of fame and glory were long since behind him. His cowardly memory always conveniently seemed to gloss over all the latter mediocrity of his life. A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do, he told himself. He knew that if he did not allow his mind to trick him into thinking the best of himself as often as possible, he would slip even further down into self loathing and insanity. So he tried to hang on to all the happy tidbits of his past and to blot out of existence all the darker things, as though crossing them out with a permanent marker, just like censored parts of documents. The Courts might never expunge his record, but his mind could. Though he might never be able to forgive himself, he could choose to forget. He had always marveled at how skilled the human mind was at unlearning things….almost as skilled as it was at learning them, it seemed. One day’s pressing matter usually faded into a week or a month’s overall concerns. Like a rolling pin, life seemed to smooth out the highs and lows of life into fairly homogenous dough. As layers of filling were poured onto the dough, it became the surface upon which new, hopefully good things could come into being. Even at one’s worst, he or she was always regenerating him or herself, though often without even being aware of it. Some things, however, resisted the cyclical movement of the rolling pin. They formed clumps in the dough, giving it a somewhat chunky texture in places. They clung to the mixture like indelible coffee stains to a white shirt, such that one just had to resign oneself to their presence. He tried not to think of those things.
Chirp, chirp. Whereas before, several birds had been agitating themselves outside his window, he now only heard one. Where were the other birds? Had they left that one bird behind? Were they simply hiding in a bush to play a prank on him? Were they just being quiet? And what did the bird’s chirping signify? He could not see it from where he was. He would have to investigate the matter further when the nurse arrived. In the meantime, he imagined that the little creature had hurt his leg and that his friends had abandoned him. Now, he peeped for help and attention, but no one was there to give it to him. He wished he could have gotten up and walked outside to check on the poor thing. He would have made him a nest himself if he had to, even taken him in. He would have nursed him. He would have done his best to make up for the cruelty of the world. It would have just been one victim helping another. But he could not even move. He could not even stand up for the bird or for himself. He would never be able to stand up ever again. Forever more, he was sentenced to that bed and to that chair, and it was just as bad as the prison sentence he had somehow gotten out of, if not worse. At least, in prison, he would have been able to expiate his guilt. Here, however, he just tried to hold it back, and it kept on creeping back up, in his thoughts, in his nightmares, in every sight and sound. He could not purge his offense and, immobile as he was, he could do nothing for the good of other living beings, nothing at all to ease his conscience.