The End and Everything Before It

by Finegan Kruckemeyer

slid down the wall as tiredness placed a caring hand upon his shoulder and bade him go to ground.

He seemed like one who counted days by their small successes, not their tragedies. What a thing that was.

A part of love is sacrifice, and though the sacrifices between Pat and his mum only ever went in one direction, that didn’t make the love any less. The more she failed, the more he loved, and it would always be that way. Take away the big mouth, the nickname, the real name, the years we knew each other, the years before or after, and that love remained. It was his skeleton, the thing that kept him standing.

And I learnt in that moment that love is a document that has to be translated. It’s written in so many languages, and each version you come across you have to learn anew. The word for regret in one love sounds exactly the same as the word for pride in another. And learning any one dialect is an education that takes as long as those two people have known each other.

But for me that moment made me feel more like an orphan than ever before.