word count: 1100

He had started - somewhat worryingly - to think of the person that he was before as a separate entity. He had furthermore decided that his past self was every bit as obnoxious as his current one was, with the annoying addition that now he, Kay, was the victim of his own bullshit.

He had left himself quite a bit of stuff, but almost none of it was useful beyond the clothes and the cash. What was the point of a decade-old sketchbook with mediocre marker graffiti tags in it? What was the point of a class ring that even he recognized could not possibly be his, and might as well have been any other stranger’s? What was the point of a list of names only labeled “mice RIP,” if he could not even remember the pets to which this presumably alluded?

And maybe he had meant to be useful to his future self in leaving these things, to be fair. Other things seemed to be gifts from a friend, or even a well-meaning brother: things he knew he’d want. There was a relief in the fact that none of his shoes had laces, and although he did not know why it was a relief, he understood intuitively that this had been a kindness from himself. He had not understood why there was a single random keychain, until he had found himself thoughtlessly toying with a clicking mechanism on it during a moment of quiet anxiety. An empty box of cigarettes that he realized later was an attempt to help him remember his preferred brand for better times or bigger paychecks, even though he'd been smoking the cheapest ones he could on the night that he finally threw himself on the mercy of others.

It was good to be known, even if it was only by yourself.

Perhaps he had underestimated how much would be lost, or had optimistically banked on it, although this seemed unlikely given that the first emotion that he had felt had been a horrible grief at the realization that he had not forgotten the thing which he had principally meant to.

Not that he remembered all of that, either. In some ways it was worse, to know that he had some sort of innocent blood on his hands and not even to have an explanation for how it got there. Maybe it would have been a relief to him to know that he would not remember doing it, if he had been able to tell himself so beforehand. Maybe the shapelessness of his nightmares would be a comfort, as much as they were an uneasy torment now. But to at least know what justification he had given himself would at least have let him get the guilt into his hands, somewhere he could control it.

In his better moments he thought: surely if it had been truly justified - had been in some way a defense of himself, a me-or-him sort of situation - he would not have been so wracked by the incessant guilt that he had gone so far as to throw himself away in an attempt to erase it.

But maybe -

He had learned instead to make peace with the guilt, and the ease with which he had done it told him that maybe it was something the past version of himself had done at some point as well, which again fueled a hope that its reception had been eased by a sense that he had done the best thing available to him - some lesser evil type of choice. The guilt was not to be ignored. That was not peace. It was to be received as a guest at his inward table, and looked in the eye, and addressed as an equal. He would sit down with his guilt until the day he died.

The only relief in doing an unforgivable act of evil was in knowing that it tormented you, and would torment you forever. The only grounds on which he could not reproach himself was a knowledge that he sometimes woke from unremembered nightmares feeling physically sick with regret. It was good, after all, that he had not succeeded in his cowardly attempt to simply eradicate the memory from himself, which - he supposed - must have been a primary driver of his decision.

He had come almost to despise that other person, who had tried to run away from the comfort of guilt. But then again, he had known things that Kay did not. He had understood what it was that had led him to that decision.

And one day, when the first chilly morning blew in to Destiny City that Autumn, he was given another reason to despise him, when he put on his warm jacket for the first time and found in the pocket a folded up square of paper, labeled in a handwriting that he recognized to be his own.

Why you did it.

That had been two weeks ago and for fourteen days he had found his thoughts recurring with pathological regularity to the still-folded square of paper, which now reposed in his wallet. Break glass in case of emergency.

Just following orders. Held at gunpoint. Him or Me. Thought it was for a Glorious Purpose. Whatever was in there was something to explain why he had done that godawful thing, which he could now no longer recall doing. Which meant that that version of himself, who had brought him to this point, had looked over his memory of the situation and felt both that he would want explanation, and that it could be explained.

It would be nice to suppose that some pivotal epoch marked his decision to open the paper. Some especially vivid nightmare; some act of heroism; a failure to save a life.

But it was nothing much. He was lying in bed, thinking of nothing in particular, when his thoughts were recalled to its existence, and for no real reason - well.

He wanted to be relieved of some of that burden. The man he had been had written this, and he had put with things he needed to navigate this new life. There would be some relief in reading why it was that he had done the unremembered act of evil. It would be a comfort to know his reasons, and to trace the flawed justifications from one faulty premise to another and arrive with sympathetic regret at the conclusion that had been his spilling blood that wasn’t his to spill. Nearly anything, after all, could be explained, and perhaps there was some redemption in even a bad explanation.

He unfolded it, then, and after a moment he set it gently aside, and stood up to go smoke on the stoop outside the apartment.

It was good to be known, even if it was only by yourself.

The letter lay open where he had left it beside the bed, a sheet of lined paper carefully removed from some notebook and written in a neater hand than usual, as if what it said was too important to risk a single illegible word:

Stop trying to justify it.