Wake up. Other side of bed empty. Cold. That's normally how life is. It still sucks every single time. That how you got here. Hating that cold empty bed in the morning. Well maybe it's not that simple, but if you have to look at the deepest darkest root of this particular tree of calamity ,that IS where you started. An empty bed.
You couldn't have got here without having acquired the set of skills that you already had. But it wasn't the skills that caused you to make those choices. They made the choices options, but knowing how to do those things isn't the same as choosing to kill so many people. It's not the same as making powerful, wealthy, Dangerous, enemies. You didn't have a price on your head when the knowledge was still just in your head.
It is a good morning to think about it. In a cold unfamiliar place. How you got here. What you will do from here. A path forward. How do you want it to end? is there a way from here to there? Do you really have a choice? Perhaps you can answer that for all of us.
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Another morning. A year and a half ago. Another empty bed. That morning you didn't expect it to be empty. You expected the delicious piece of too young for you but still plenty old enough to decide for herself cutiepie to be there. She said she would be. But she wasn't. A man who didn't hate waking alone so much would have left it at that. She wouldn't have been invited back. You could have been left with the wreckage of a life you had then. Is this really worse?
The evening before had been something hadn't it? A call out of the blue. You hadn't heard from her in months. You had worked together in some dead end job a year ago. the kind of place where the keep cute girls in the office as an enticement for the guys like you to actually show up in the morning. they had jobs, but their real purpose was to make you feel wanted, needed, appreciated. Technical boys getting underpaid in a bad economy are hard to keep.
The circumstances of her leaving the job were not clear, but you never bothered to ask. After she left the job you went out a couple times, never seriously. Some kissing, her hand down your pants, maybe. She had slept over a couple times. No sex, but good snuggle and you woke up to a warm bed. Then she stopped calling.
So when the call came, you picked her up. No matter that you had to go to some shithole in the worst part of Niagara Falls. Which is in itself one of the worst shitholes in Western New York. You took her home. She came. Three or four times apiece. You collapsed into the sweaty tangle of sheets and girl and slept.
You fully expected to wake up and do it all again in the morning. Have breakfast and talk about what was going on. Figure out where she was living and why she was there. The things you should have asked last night. Your expectations were not met. She was gone. The bed empty. Cold. No longer wonderfully sweaty. just damp. there were other things gone as well, but you didn't know or care then. By the time you knew you were way past caring.
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Back to this morning. That cold unfamiliar bed is in a cold unfamiliar motel room near a permeable border where they don't already know you. This is where you came to decide. Do you run? Do you die trying? The fact that you are here shows you are thing of running. From here you could run. You could live long enough to die of old age. A boring lonely old age. You aren't a hero. At least you didn't mean to be.
The people who want you dead don't want you dead because you are a hero. They want you dead because they see you as a threat to their way of life. At this point killing you is mostly symbolic. Getting the money back isn't going to help them much. Replacing their network wasn't going to happen any faster with you dead. Your death needs to be a deterrent. They need it to be awful and on youtube. They need to make sure noone else gets the idea that they could do what you did.
Even if you didn't mean to be one there are people who do think you are a hero. Who assumed that if you did bad things to evil men you must be a good guy. You know better. All you wanted was to take back what was taken from you. Make those that took it understand it wasn't theirs to take. It seemed so simple at the time. One thing led to another.
The men and women who helped you aren't really in any more danger than they were already. They were mostly a danger to their loved ones and themselves when you came to them. Now they are slightly less so. A purpose and the opportunity for fear is all they really needed. It didn't really matter where it came from. Who knew that the best treatment for PTSD was more traumatic stress. You had known for years. Now that they know how to survive back here they don't really need you anymore.
Should you stay or should you go?
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