Quantum Fluctuation

We all got together to remember him. We got together to tell each other what we loved best about him.

We got together to tell each other that we couldn’t blame ourselves.

We held each others’ hands and looked into each others’ eyes and asked, pleaded, with each other…please don’t blame yourself.

We smiled rueful, tearstained smiles and celebrated his life, and our innocence. We shook our heads over what a shame it all was and we nodded over how impossible it would have been to prevent.

We got together, all of us, to affirm our belief in death as the uncaused cause. We proclaimed despair a quantum particle, spontaneously generated by a mysterious uncertainty principle that brings grief and fear and hopelessness and destruction out of nowhere, and no matter how much we might wish we could have done something…

No matter how much we wished it could have been different…

There was nothing to be done. We could not have prevented this. This was a dark quirk of a cold universe. This was not our doing. This was not our doing.

We could not blame ourselves.

And we took home with us, every one, a burning, itching secret. Everyone knew it but it would stay a secret as long as nobody said it out loud.

That secret was: we could blame ourselves.

We could easily blame ourselves, so easily we’d spend a lifetime remaining ever-vigilant to make sure we didn’t. We’d carry our secret to our own grave, knowing how quickly things fall apart when secrets are loosed.

Nevertheless we knew it.

We knew we could have blamed ourselves, for the time we had ignored his call.

We could have blamed ourselves, for turning our backs the day he screamed for us and we had better things to do.

We could have blamed ourselves for the eyes we rolled when he grated on us and the noses we looked down when he showed his unforgivable weakness.

We could have blamed ourselves for the laughter and the jokes and the times we put him out of our minds in favour of the more pressing matters of life.

We could have blamed ourselves for the times the world caught him in its gears, and we sided with the world. The times he was hurt and we stayed solid with the ones who hurt him, because life has enough complications without getting involved.

We could have blamed ourselves, for the thousand tiny wounds we’d been happy to inflict on the path of least resistance.

But what would be the point? Blaming ourselves would not bring him back. The main thing is to move on. And remember, no matter what we had done…

There was nothing we could do.

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