Good-Bye

Lauren

October 1999

How long can it last, the fake smiles, the over enthusiasm, and the false pretenses of happiness and wholeness? Under enough pressure, even the strongest of materials will bend, giving way to the unseen forces that mold them.

Duo sighed and watched the rain falling on the tree outside the window. The water gathered at the leaf's stem and ran in little rivulets down the veins of the leaf, dropping in a miniature waterfall to the thirsty soil below. Duo laughed bitterly.

" Nature is so perfect. The plants provide the soil with shade and water, and the soil gives back water in a useable form enriched with nutrients essential for growth. They live in harmony with each other, giving and taking equally. If only humans could do the same."

Duo felt it more than the others, the drain on his spirit, constantly giving his love and support, while the others ignored his pain as if it didn't exist. Everyone needs support once in a while, and today had been the last straw. His sanity, his small pocket of faith and love for others, today its frail casing shattered, releasing all of its contents to the wind.

The others were out on missions, and Duo was left alone in the small cottage that was their current hiding place with Trowa. A storm had been pounding at the windows all morning, and Duo had resigned himself to a day inside storm watching. As the hours alone with his thoughts ticked away, he became more and more agitated. Memories, some old, some more recent, pecked away at his good humor, until nothing was left of the happiness Duo usually carried with him.

" I'm alone… I have no God. I've no true friends. My world mean nothing… life means nothing."

" But wait, there are the other pilots," his heart provided.

" They don't know me. They don't want to know me; I'm only a tool to them. Someone to help them when they are in need only."

" That's not true…"

Duo laughed at the argument he had with himself and went to the kitchen in search of food. Trowa sat at the small table, watching the greenish glow of his laptop. Duo's heart fell. The others should be back by now. Duo bit back the overwhelming need to pour his soul's pain out to the silent boy at the table. After an hour of sitting immobile, Duo gave in slightly to his need for human comfort. Trowa would understand how lost he felt, he knew he would. Duo slowly looked up at the boy across from him.

" Trowa…" he stated tentatively.

" I am busy."

Duo laughed a self-depreciating laugh bordering on hysteria.

" Sorry…" and Duo fled the room to his seat by the window.

Had it not been this way his whole life? He always understood a little too much, felt a little too deeply, tried a little too hard, smiled one too many times without feeling. He'd almost fooled himself into thinking he was happy this time, that someone might care. It was ironic that the boy had rejected him, without even knowing it. Trowa had hurt Duo deeper than he could ever realize.

" I understand him… I know how he feels. I know the look in his eyes, in his posture, in his aura. I know how it feels to be used for someone else's momentary pleasure and then be left a broken thing. I know what it is to have your innocence stolen. I have lived it all as well. Still, no one wants understanding. They don't want solutions, consolations. They want to talk at you, not with you."

It had been one time too many. Just for once in his life, Duo had needed someone to listen to him. To let him cry and whine, and save him having to listen. He'd sought this out in the one person he knew would understand his pain, if the one would listen. Trowa had turned him away. Duo had always loved the quiet boy, knowing that his silence held great pain, that his words meant more than the surface meanings, knowing he had survived similar pains. Duo hugged himself, curled up into a little ball, and he cried. He wept has he hadn't wept in years. A tear for each pain, for each moment in his life when his soul had cried for help and found none. His breath came in small hiccups, and slowed to a steady rhythm with the rain. In the time while he lay there, night had come, and with it came the other pilots. Still, he did not see their forms enter the cottage. Duo lay there for a day and a night, curled in on himself, thinking. With each tick of the clock, with each drop of rain that rasped on the window pain, his thoughts became clearer. He knew. He knew what he should do.

" All things are part of nature. Humans have set themselves outside the natural cycles. We are a plaque on ourselves, working only towards destroying each other."

Duo sat up slowly and walked softly across the cold wood floor, cherishing the feeling of the cold damp on his bare feet. He walked out the door, and to the nearby trees. He watched and smiled in wonder as the forest changed around him. The squirrel that ran up the tree to escape the rain, the mother bird folding her wing protectively over her young, and the water, rolling off of the tree leaves and down to the ground, mixing in the wonders of nature. He too would be like the leaves that were slowly being decomposed by the bacteria on the ground. He too would become a nutrient for the tree that gave the world its shelter. Duo pulled his gun from its space in his pants and carefully examined it. It was not part of nature, not any more. Men had twisted and warped it, so that it was, "useful". Well, maybe it too will once again find its way back into the cycle of things, mixing with the earth. Duo closed his eyes, taking in the sounds of nature, of this beloved place they called home. His mind's eye played for him all his memories of childhood. The sound of the gun shot blended in with the thunder, nature's way of approving of the act. And Duo's body fell gracefully to the forest floor. The tiny bacteria got to work returning the nitrogen and other nutrients back to the soil.

*The troubles of the young are soon over; they leave no external mark. If you wound the tree in its youth the bark will quickly cover the gash; but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off, and looking carefully, you will see the scar there still. All that is buried is not dead. The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this - its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.

* From Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm