The sun has gone

The sun has gone down on my aspirations for a normal life. I watched it happen the way a man watches a distant storm swallow a town he once loved. There was no dramatic collapse. No thunder. No grand tragedy. Just a slow extinction of possibility. Those aspirations would not see another day. I stood in the darkness and watched them freeze to death. I did nothing to stop it. People say dreams die with a bang. Mine didn't. Mine died with a whisper so faint I almost mistook it for the wind moving through dead leaves. Eight hours. Based on the dozen hours I spent educating myself on the human body's decomposition process, Nioholas had been dead for roughly eight hours by the time I found him. People spend their entire lives carrying around the illusion that there is something sacred about the human form. Something noble. Something divine. Eight hours strips that illusion away. What I found lying on the floor was Nicholas only in the most technical sense. The shape was familiar, but familiarity is not identity. The body had already begun its retreat from humanity., as did I. And His skin had taken on strange colors. His features looked distorted, exaggerated, almost artificial. He reminded me of a badly designed machine attempting to imitate a person. A caricature. An imitation. A failed prototype. I stared at him for what felt like hours. The room was silent except for the thumps coming from my own chest. Then I heard it. A sharp snap inside my head. Not with my ears. Inside. The sound of a rubber band stretched too far between careless fingers. A tiny sound. But it changed everything. Something broke. Not my sanity. Not my morality. Something smaller and far more dangerous. Hope. A month has passed. The people responsible are still walking around beneath the same sky as everyone else. They laugh, They drink. They waste their evenings chasing temporary pleasures and meaningless excess. They move through their transient lives with the confidence of people who believe consequences are things that happen only to others. Meanwhile, Nicholas is still dead. The imbalance of that fact gnaws at me. At first it was anger. Anger is simple. Anger is human. It burns hot and bright. Anger uses emotion for it's fuel. But eventually anger consumes its own fuel. What remains afterward is something colder. Something quieter. Rage. People confuse the two. They are not the same. Anger is an emotion. Rage is what survives after every emotion has burned away. Rage is evolution through extinction. The final form of grief. I have always considered myself a deliberate man. Every important decision in my life was weighed, measured, examined from every possible angle. That is why I find myself ashamed. Because I know what has been growing inside me. I know its shape. I know its hunger. And despite knowing, I have continued feeding it. Day after day. Night after night. Until it became larger than the man who carries it. Vengeance is emotional. Vengeance seeks satisfaction. This thing inside me seeks neither. It does not care about closure. It does not care about peace. It only cares about balance. About settling an account that the universe seems unwilling to acknowledge. So let this stand as my declaration of intent. Not a threat. Not a promise. A confession. The people responsible took more than Nicholas. They took the future I believed existed beyond that day. They took the illusion that justice arrives on its own. They took the version of me that could still look at the world and see order. I sat down to write a short private piece about how beautiful the sunrise was this morning. And this is where I ended up. That's how I know that there's no path back to normal for me now. "Alea Iacta Est," the words of Julius Caesar before he led his 13th Legion across the Rubicon —an act of insurrection that defied the Roman Senate and sparked a massive civil war that devastated the entire world. It means "the die is cast" things have been set into motion that cannot be stopped. irreversible decision—taking a step into the unknown from which there is no turning back. There is a stranger wearing my face. And every morning when I look into the mirror, I see him staring back. Patient. Silent. Waiting to discover whether he still belongs among the living—or whether he died eight hours after Nicholas and simply forgot to lie down.