November 1st (Frerard)

29: Monday, October 29th

The world is so grey away from the ocean.

It is perhaps overwhelming, although Gerard was an easily overwhelmed person and began to wonder if thus his opinion really counted for much.

And Gerard was hardly a person anymore, just a wreckage and a cruel reminder of who he used to be; a house burning down, the kind of house people kept running into to try and save things from, but it was never any use, and they just kept getting burnt in the process, and of course, Gerard didn't want them to get hurt, but they wanted to save what was inside and Gerard had known that when he started the fire, and they would go inside to save him, or try to, and Gerard had known too all along.

Gerard wondered what on Earth he could count for when today was the twenty ninth of October, and tomorrow was the thirtieth, and the day after tomorrow the thirty first, and the day that being his last.

There wasn't much left him, and he most certainly had kept much left for himself.

Because the thing was that Frank and Kat had been beginning to piece things and they were ready to stop this all and put the fire out, but Gerard hadn't gotten to October twenty ninth to see November second; he hadn't gotten this far to keep going.

There was this concept of a marathon in his head, and now he was only a matter of a few days away from the finish line, and here they were to pull the finish line away from him: further away, to where they thought it should be, perhaps another sixty years or so down the line, but the thing was, Gerard just couldn't keep running for that long; he'd been running to reach a finish line and for it all to stop come November 1st, and if they attempted to prevent that, then he'd simply collapse somewhere along the way.

So he did all he thought to do; he kept running, he just ran in a slightly different direction: an alternate route that'd get him to that finish line just as well.

He had his wallet and his cellphone, his camera and a blue pen, letters already written and letters to be written, but besides that, nothing else. He had himself and he had something like three days left and an odd state of calm inside him as he had made his way to the other side of town and sat down on the outskirts of the woods in a field with his back against a stone wall and wondered what could come of him in the next three days.

He didn't want to run away; he had wanted to spend his last few days with the people he loved; he had wanted to attend Frank's birthday party and give him some form of adequate birthday gift in aid of perhaps balancing the act of killing himself, but now he had to spend those days hiding from them, because they wouldn't understand; they could never understand, because this was it, time was nearly fucking up, he was going to die on November 1st - that was a very fixed point in time, and easily the highlight of his life.

He was sorry though - this shouldn't have been the way to go, but it was circumstantial, and it wasn't really anyone's fault, and Gerard had far too few days left of his life to get angry, or to even give one single fuck; it was an odd kind of euphoric feeling as you floated out in the calm waves of a tide that never went in or out as it was the tide of an lake soon to be drained, but the lake remained calm because there was no point in fighting as there was nothing to change, and there'd be so many more oceans, rivers, and lakes, and a whole world beyond that.

He really did regret not being able to attend Frank's birthday party, because he had wanted to be there for him; he had wanted to spend his last night with him, and he'd wanted to slip away early in the morning and kill himself before anyone really knew what was wrong.

And Frank would cry.

But people did cry.

In the end, Frank would have cried at some point whether he had killed himself or not.