The Moth and the Candle

The balance of life was struck in moments like these, he thought. My life in any case. No one else knows how to approach them, they require a level of detail and an instant decision and prompt two emotions primarily....relief and regret. Depending on the outcome. Max saw this. He felt it. He knew he knew it, yet it didn’t seem...correct was the word. The world was just so much more complex, more daunting than this philosophy allowed. The range of options, the annihilation of one’s consciousness in the face of true freedom simply froze him. Max was paralysed by the big bad world. All was frightening but and still and still...the richness, the marvellous complexity of it made him wonder and provoked one more, nihil ultimo, emotion...hope. Hope that he clung to. Hope that he cherished that sat, a helpful toad on a great big stone in the back of his mind. Max was disbelieving. The woman of his world. She just didn’t credit him. She said cowardice played a huge role in his behaviour, that hiding behind excuses demonstrated his lack of character, the absence of that simple strength. She did not, however, condemn him for it. Everyone has a weakness, she often said, some are more obvious than others but they’re all there, somewhere. What drove her he couldn’t say and he was wary of even speculating. Max was not afraid of her or her coldly logical taunts. He found her voice, mechanical as it was, soothing paying no heed to content hearing on the pressure of vowels, diphthongs and consonants sliding over one another, roiling between her lips and tongue, oiled snakes across a shifting slippery floor.


She had brought him home. At mid morning, when there were very few of the neighbours around to witness it. She had pulled him out of the car mewling and gagging, crying out at the injustice of it all the maudlin drunk in the middle of suburbia, her embarrassment, his fate. They had struggled together, staggering over the threshold knocking over a plant pot her mother had given them one Christmas. The broken shards of pottery lay there in big sharp sheaves. He fell, of course, landing on one of them. His skin was like parchment, scraped dry and brittle by years of malnutrition. Max watched the blood drip from his arm. He gingerly licked a droplet off his wrist and made a face. When she looked down she didn’t seem angry. She didn’t even seem ashamed. All Max could see on her face was bone tiredness, an exhaustion of her soul. She was too tired to even stop caring. All she knew was the path she had always walked and was too stuck in a fog of fatigue to even know how to go about finding a new one. So she helped him up and dressed the wound on his arm. She even put him to bed and made sure he had something to drink, leaving a glass of water on the bedside table. Max would always remember the look on her face as she stood over him that morning. She was absent-mindedly stroking his hair but the expression did not match the action. She looked like she was trying to figure out who he was, like a stray dog that has wandered into the garden, she stroked his hair and simply looked...puzzled. He tried to say something to her but it was as if someone glued his mouth together, he couldn’t speak

As he was woken up by Donal Burke, their GP, he remembered that look on her face most of all. They told him they found her in Merrion Square. She used to like visiting the gardens and would sit there on her lunch breaks from her job in the insurance company on Leeson Street. She had sat down on a bench in one of the alcoves in the northwest corner of the Square and had never gotten up again. Max knew what he had to do. All time is time now passed. He wished for many things but he had never gotten any of the things he had asked for. He had always asked for himself, never for others even though he knew he should have. It would not have made any difference in the end but those favours begged, those wheedling requests and outright demands meant he had a keen sense of his own entitlement, an entitlement that was never satisfied.

When he thought of her sitting on a cold wet bench in that Georgian park where lovers and dopers and homeless and office workers and students and artists and workmen had all sat before her and how she used a place that she liked to look last upon something, at least, that she found lovely, he knew what that look on her face was. He knew why it was there. It wasn’t sorrow or resentment that created her confusion. Max knew it. It was wonder at the simple and monumental shift that her being had made in deciding that enough was finally enough. Max wept. He cried bitter tears of recrimination at himself, at life, at her leaving him like this. He knew though, that the only point at which they had understood one another was in death and after the fact. That was why he hanged himself from the fifth banister of the stairs using an old tow rope he found in the garage. Nevermore, once more, Max saw what must be foretold in the face of someone he loved but could never leave.