Chapter 7g
After more than a year of waiting I finally admitted defeat. The new millennium did not usher in a new age. It did not bring about the end of the world. It did not suddenly make men more moral. Even Y2K was a bust, although I and most other decently educated people never gave much mind to that nonsense, anyway. Listen, people, if your computers can't handle the change from 1999 to 2000, is that really the kind of machine you want managing your bank account and all of your personal information?
Still, I had really hoped for something. Not an act of God like a great flood or the destruction of Gomorrah, just some normal madness like war being declared somewhere new, maybe even a battle on American soil was due. Now, middle of the year following the new millennium, and still nothing.
I started waiting for the world to die when I was thirteen while nursing my injured pride forming a new scar. The stitches came out just over a week later. There was an appointment for me to have the doctors remove them but I wasn't ready to go back in there with all the eyes of pity or judgment or even just questions of what happened to me or how I got hurt. I cut them with fingernail clippers and pulled them out myself. Some hand gunk crusted around and hurt to pull out but each one felt a million times better than what I had felt when I got the cut and a billion times better than having it cleaned and stitched and dressed.
Those two weeks were enough to heal all the surface area but the gash in my hand was still deep and gaped open without the bits of thread to hold it closed. I probed it cautiously and curiously but there wasn't much to see. The skin had grown down into a deep valley and was slowly repairing itself, though I would have that long scar cutting the topography of my hand in half for the rest of my life.
Even as I healed from the loss of Sandra and from the lack of an apocalypse I could see that familiar white line. The angle had it almost hidden in the fold of my hand but the scar is too white, too straight and too clear to be anything else. Still, most people don't see a scar like that, I only pick it out so easily because we've been together for so long, so I was grateful, at least in some ways.
In some ways, though, I was also grateful to be able to see it. So many things leave scars than can't be seen. The world might be a better place if people could see through the skin every time somebody's had a serious injury. Then again, maybe not. At that age, if I saw somebody with no obvious scars, well, that was still pretty normal. But if even emotional trauma gave scars and I still saw somebody without any? I would feel compelled, maybe even morally obligated, to beat the shit out of that person and give them a few scars to work with.
But, then again, I wouldn't ever see anybody like that, would I? Not everybody has the same trauma. Some people saw their pet die as a child. Some have seen siblings and parents die. Some have had a bad break up. Some have done none of these things, maybe the worst thing they can name that's happened to them was a hangnail, but I would wager that hangnail was devastating and that person probably cried like a scolded child.
Either way, I guess I don't really know what the outcome of a world like that would be and I guess I don't really care. That was becoming sort of the motto of my life during that period and I embraced it fully. The world I had little to say about, I just wanted the scars for myself. Not to show off as proud battle scars, just to keep to myself as sad reminders of where I've been wronged and, more often, gone wrong myself.
I wonder what kind of scar the end of the world would leave? Probably something huge and disfiguring that all of humanity would wear together. We'd learn to accept that scar, we'd all have it, but nobody would like it, nobody would ever be seen as attractive to anybody else for several generations until a scar of that magnitude had time to heal. At least, that's how I like to think it would be. It's starting to look like I'll have to wait another thousand years for such a pristine opportunity to arise again. I've waited a year, more than a year to account for mathematical error on the part of whoever decides the world should end, and nothing so far but maybe it's still just late. I'll keep waiting, I guess, because I don't have much choice, but how could fate miss such a perfect and obvious chance to wipe us clean of existence? Maybe that's too obvious. I wonder if they said the same thing a thousand years ago. Actually, I'm not too sure anybody really said that in 2001, I think I was just hopeful. Either way, neither answer bothered me, and I would continue to be hopeful until the world finally did wake up.