Angel Dust - Terry Kuder III (best classic books txt) 📗

thick liquid. It splattered the door tingeing the white paint into a pink shade. My head hit the tile floor with a huge thud. I began convulsing, shaking uncontrollably as the last of the blood left my system. It slid down my neck pooling onto the floor in a huge puddle spreading across as if to conquer anything that was white.
My final thoughts were of her. I loved her very much and I never fully comprehended what happened or why it had happened. All I knew was that it had happened. I couldn't feel the pain anymore which I took as a good sign. The lack of pain was my final goal and I had achieved it with flying colors. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, but I knew I couldn't. "Did it really matter?" I found myself asking again. Her face flashed once more into my fading mind. She was smiling again and I found myself smile back at her as my eyelids slowly closed.

2

Immortal

"DAMMIT! Not again!!" said Dan. "Come on! How many times are you going to do this? I hope you're going to clean this mess up."
The muscles began stitching themselves together. The torn tendons circled around each other, slowly reattaching themselves into a solid piece. Each piece intertwined with each other forming a deformity that could only occur in a horror movie. As the threads knitted themselves, my eyes sprang wide suddenly. I tossed around, flopping over from side to side like a fish gasping for air. My eyes were still at the back of my head as I tossed around like some sort of exorcism. I grabbed at my throat in a failed attempt to bridge the gap in my neck to my throat. The lines of flesh finally emerged into one another and finally healed themselves. My neck was finally complete and it looked as if I hadn't just slit my own throat five minutes ago.
Dan knelt down beside me. "Again?"
"Yeah." I whispered.
"Dude, you need to get over this."
I looked long and hard at Dan. "How do you suppose I go about doing that?"
"I don't know, man, but you can't keep doing this. It can't be good for you."
My name is Ryter. It seems as if I was cursed with ability to quickly regenerate myself. Essentially, I can't die. Many people would probably kill in order to receive immortal life, but as a irony would have it, it's not something I wish to have. Not now at least. At one point in time, it was an honor to have this gift, but not now. There's a common misconception about being immortal: the flaw with this is that even though you can't really die, you can still feel the pain. You can feel everything from the tiniest scratch to the deepest scar. You can even feel your heart break.
I'm not a vampire and I'm certainly not a God; neither one of them would be able to feel this. Maybe being one of them would make things easier. I don't know how I got to be this way, but it seems as if I was either destined to feel this pain without an opportunity to escape it or I was destined to go out in some other way beyond my control. How I curse it. The funny thing about an immortal having their heart break is that not even that can be repaired. Not as easily at least. As mentioned before, occurrences can happen that can create such a ripple and the ripples go on and on, becoming an echo of themselves until they have no place to go...and then they just fade. Is that what I am? Just a ripple? An echo of something that happened? Another misconstrued idea about those who can't die is that people think that they have forever to fix their mistakes. Wrong. Oh, how terribly wrong those fools are. It doesn't matter that we can't die; the people that we would want to apologize to would eventually die. We're immortal, not perfect. We make mistakes just as much as the next person. We make those minuscule mistakes that can be tossed aside and forgiven and then there's those...those that can't be as ragged as the small ones.
"Dude, it's been what? Nearly a year? You got to let go."
I stared at Dan again. What does he know? He's never been in love. He can't understand how I feel. He can't comprehend the concept of wanting that one person, but for them to never want you again. He can't truly wrap his brain around never feeling the same for another person. I can't blame him though. Maybe if he was in my situation, he would. Maybe if he couldn't die, then he would try to off himself in a failed attempt to stop hurting or in an accomplished attempt to feel a different kind of pain other than the one you can't reach.
"Dan..." I started. "What is love to you?"
He gave me a puzzled look, trying to understand what I was getting at. "Well....um...let's see..."
"...because to me...love is this." Again, I received another puzzled look. "Love is feeling this pain. Do you have any idea what it would take to get rid of this...this aching, unbearable, intolerable, heart wrenching, feeling? Do you know how hard it is to wake up every morning and not look forward to a damn thing in the day because you know that if you don't even get to see her face then you can't be happy? Do you, Dan? Do you? Can you even understand loving someone with everything you have, literally every fabric of your being?"
"Well....if Sarah and I..." he started.
"You and Sarah!?" I scoffed. "You and Sarah? You and Sarah aren't even remotely close to what I feel. You and Sarah are a proximity infatuation. You've barely been with the girl for six months. Try multiplying that by ten. Try forgetting every single memory that you have with her knowing that for the rest of your days you will never forget that. Try going to sleep at night with the illusion that sleep would actually make you feel better, but knowing that whatever nightmares you have about not even being with her aren't even nightmares, but reality. Try not forgetting every important day that signifies everything for you. Try not listening to a song that reminds you of her. Try doing all of this Dan and then you can start to get a tiny idea of what I'm going through. Try....just try, Dan....try to be able to kill yourself, knowing that you can't, just to forget that she ever existed and wake up with the engraved image of her beautiful smile."
Dan just stood there speechless. After a couple of moments, he regained his composure. "So, go get her." The words themselves were so simple to say. The action contradicted its own intentions. Sure, I had thought about the whole "fairy tale" idea where I go running back to her, throwing myself into her arms, crying, and telling her how I couldn't live without her. Nonetheless, reality set in. The truth was...I was immortal. I could live without her. Hell, I could live without anyone. Even if this weren't the truth she didn't want me. She had made that known the last time we talked.
"I can't." I finally mustered up.
"Then stop your bitching! You claim that you're head over heels for this girl and yet you're not moving a damn finger to go after her. Dude, you can't die. What more motivation do you need? You can go back as many times as you need with knowledge that it's not the end of the fucking world. This emo shit is starting to piss me off, seriously. Seeing a carpenter in here every week because you're too weak to sustain your own bullshit and decide to stain the carpets with your own self pity is ridiculous. I tell you this out of love, bro. I really do. But, if you can't do anything about it, then move on." he said as he got up and walked away.
The response was quite a shock to me. I didn't know what to say. What could I say? He was right. Though he couldn't truly understand, he was, in fact, very right. Damn him.
I got up, grabbing a hold of the sink to ensure that I didn't slip in my own blood. I turned the water off and got a towel from the linen closet to start mopping up my mess. The towel had already been stained. I had used it before. "Fuck." I sighed. I began wiping up the gelatinous red goo. My frustration was building up, but what could I do? It was hard to tell if I was more angry with Dan for the spout-off that he just left me with or of my inability to accept that his spout-off was the truth. There was no way I could go back to her after the things that I had said and just assume that everything would be ok. No way I could think that everything would be forgiven at the drop of a dime. Despite my seemingly fictitious ability, life wasn't the same. It wasn't a fictitious fabrication of one's imagination where everything would work out in the end. I mean, hell, I just tried to commit suicide and that didn't leave a damn soul happy including myself. I finished wiping up the blood, my frustration boiling over. I ran into the living room desperate for answers.
"What the hell do you think I should do?" Dan was sitting on the couch with a remote in his hand flipping the channels looking for something to watch. "Well, Mr. I-Haven't-Been-Able-To-Keep-A-Relationship-Long-Enough-To-Even-Fall-In-Love? What do you suggest?"
"Hey, hey, now! Don't start your shit with me. Just because I was right and you're too stupid to see that doesn't mean that you have to start busting my balls over it. I don't have all the answers here. I just know that if I had your ability..."
"...curse." I interrupted.
"What?" he stopped.
"It's a curse, not an ability."
"Yeah....well....whatever. Curse, ability, special skill, power, gift, it's all the same."
"I don't think so."
"Anyways,...if I had what you had, I would be doing so much more with it. I would be fighting with all I had if I was as in love with someone as you are. I mean, I would be fighting all the demons and dragons and all that shit that would kill any normal person. I mean, why not? I couldn't die, and yeah, sure it would hurt like hell, but I could get back up and continue to fight until the thing, whatever it may be, was killed, right?" I didn't respond. I just stared down at the ground. Could I do such a thing? Could I truly show her that I loved her