A Clydesdale Carol, Part 7

(part 6 here)

Kevin did not land so much as he became aware.  Above and below and all around was this greyness.  It was at once smothering and infinitely distant.  Kevin had no sense of depth, no fixed point to relate to.  Nothing happened.  And it happened slowly.

He thought he was starting to go crazy.

"You are not going crazy," said a voice.

There, in what Kevin assumed was a socially acceptable distance away, the greyness coalesced into a man he thought looked vaguely familiar.  He wore a simple outfit of denim jeans and a button down oxford left untucked.  His sandy blondish hair was parted to the side.  The man floated over and Kevin noticed that he had the deepest, kindest, bluest eyes Kevin had ever seen.  The man looked down, then looked up again with unassuming, aw shucks impression.

The man spoke. "I am the Ghost of Weight Loss Future."

Kevin crossed his arms and said, "I suppose your name is Larry."

"No, it's Steve," the ghost said, puzzled.

"Oh, I thought...look, can we get on with this?  Where are we by the way?  Aren't you going to show me my grave and make me all scared and what not?" Kevin asked impatiently.

"No. The future isn't like that," Steve said. "The future is like this place.  It's unmade.  We are exactly 17 and half seconds into your future, Kevin."

"Oh I get it.  This is some after school special heavy handed metaphor that the future is what I make it."

"No, not at all.  The future is unmade, that is it's nature and it's essence.  You can't make your own future any more than you can make water wet."

"Then what is it? What grand life lesson am I supposed to be learning here?" Kevin asked.

"There is nothing to learn here."

"Is this some sort of Zen thing?"

Steve smiled.  "Perhaps."

Kevin struggled to make sense of it all.

"What are you afraid of, Kevin?"

"Why do you ghosts keep asking me that?  I don't know."

Steve pressed. "Kevin, tell me, why are you afraid? Tell me."

"I don't know."

"Tell me."

Kevin hesitated.

"I am alone," Kevin blurted out, red faced and agitated.  "I know I have friends and family and support and love and all that shit.  But here inside my head and in my heart and in my soul I am alone.  Because no one can make me do the work.  No one can make me stay on program. No one can make me choose to be healthy.  No one can make me like myself.  No one.  Everything depends on me. And if I fail I, have no one to blame but myself.  And I cannot bear that thought."

"I understand," said Steve. "Go on."

"I don't know man.  It sounds so crazy."  Kevin paused.  "When I am alone, when I feel alone whether it's true or not, I feel out of control a little.  Make that a lot.  Cause it all depends on me and I'm depending on a man who I don't trust to do the right thing.  And it is easier to decide to fail than it is to fail outright."

Steve asked, "Kevin, what are you afraid of?"

Kevin knew the answer.  He didn't want to say it.  He wanted to hold on to it so no one would know.  He swallowed hard.

"Me.  I am afraid of me."

"There it is, in the end. Everyone gets there eventually, though everyone has a different answer."

Kevin stayed silent.

"Kevin, what do you see?" Steve said, turning and looking into the nothing.

Kevin also looked out into the nothing. Slowly different shapes emerged.  They were images of himself.  There was a skinny Kevin.  A fat Kevin.  A Kevin laughing.  A Kevin crying.  A Kevin jogging.  There was a Kevin holding a banana.    There was a Kevin dressed as Waldo holding a turkey drumstick in one hand, a medieval battle axe in the other singing the melody from the Hallelujah chorus while dancing a jig.  That Kevin preferred  to be called Linda.  No one knew why. 

He was overwhelmed.  He sat down.  On what he wasn't sure.  He assumed there was a chair underneath him. There were hundreds of thousands of millions of Kevins of all shapes and sizes and ages and healths and some were even wearing hats, filling a huge sphere with him in the center.  Slowly the images faded, and Steve drew nearer.  His eyes were full of sadness, and joy, and concern and celebration.

"There's nothing grand here to learn. The future holds no lessons.  The hard work is back there in the present, where you're dealing with all that crap you talked about with Barry.  And you make it harder by carrying all that crap in the past, the stuff you saw with Terry.  You have a lot of work to do.  You have a lot to let go.

"See, the future can't be made, but possibilities always exist. Those Kevins you saw are your possibilities. But those possibilities are totally dependent on chance and decisions.  Hard decisions sometimes.  And the hard work of making those decisions.  And often the hard work of undoing some of those decisions.

"But you are not alone.  You never have been.  Your friends and your family can't do the work for you, but they do offer something else.  They offer their understanding.  You're not alone because everybody is living their own Christmas Carol parody, dealing with their own Ghosts from the Past, Present and Future.

"Trust yourself, Kevin.  This journey you've been on has been amazing and it will continue to be amazing."

Kevin lowered his eyes.  He said, softly, "How?  How do I trust someone who hasn't earned it even though that someone is me?"

"Its simple.  It's the same as with anyone else.  You start to trust by deciding to start to trust."

Steve began to fade and the greyness started to swirl.  There was a sound of a hundreds of thousands of millions of Kevins deep in the greyness shouting !WHOOMP!

Kevin sat up.  He was home.  Phillip was in the basement, playing his video games.  Katelyn was in her room multitasking between Twitter, Facebook, Skype, YouTube and homework.  Madilyn was practicing her French Horn.  Karilyn was laying down, reading her romance novels.

Later that evening he knew that Phillip would come up and make Madilyn laugh with some stupid joke or prank.  Katelyn would come out to tell Karilyn the sorts of things teenage girls tell their mother but not their father.  Madilyn would come out and ask Kevin if she could watch Dr. Who with him.  And at some point the girls would hug their parents and say good night. And Phillip would look at his mom and dad and say 'Later' before turning in.  And Kevin would crawl into his bed with his wife and they would say 'I love you' and Kevin would wait until Karilyn was asleep so he could sneak out and watch more Dr. Who.

All was as it should be.

He smiled to himself and murmured "And God bless us, every one."

He sat down with his laptop and began to write.

"It was a dark and stormy night. The lights flickered a bit, then dimmed, then got brighter again. Far off an owl hooted...