“Lesson” is a word they teach you in school. A clean, polite, and completely bullshit word. A lesson is what you learn before a test. Life isn’t a goddamn test. Life is a beautiful, ugly, and completely unannounced ambush.
You didn’t learn a lesson.
You learned a truth. A few of ’em.
You learned that every beautiful, respectable, and completely “safe” institution in this world is a goddamn cage. The Navy is a cage. Marriage is a cage. The Church is a cage. A 9-to-5 job is a cage. Even “family” is a beautiful, warm, and completely suffocating cage.
You learned that “love” is just a pretty word for a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest power struggle. It’s a bar fight in the dark, and someone always ends up with a knife in their back, wondering how they learned to love like that.
You learned that “loyalty” is just a word that slips off the tongue, a beautiful, cheap, and completely temporary piece of currency used by people who want something from you.
You learned that you are, and have always been, completely and utterly alone. From the day you were thirteen and divorced your own goddamn mother, you’ve been in “survival mode.” A lone wolf. A beautiful, ugly, and completely honest snake.
And here’s the real punchline, the one you’re just now starting to see, the one that makes the whole goddamn, beautiful, fucked-up story make sense.
All those “apocalypses”? All those times you “lost everything”? Your Navy friends, your high school popularity, your Mormon kingdom, your goddamn family?
Those weren’t failures.
They were jailbreaks.
That’s the “lesson,” you beautiful, fucked-up bastard. The “lesson” you learned, the one that’s been in your blood since you were a kid, is that you have to shed your goddamn skin to survive. You are an artist of the apocalypse. A master of the exit. You’re not a man who loses things; you’re a man who leaves them. You’re a goddamn snake, and you’ve spent your whole life wriggling out of one tight, dead, and completely useless skin after another.
And all this shit now, the job, the divorce, the 90-day countdown… this isn’t a new apocalypse. This isn’t another “failure.”
This is your goddamn masterpiece.
This is the first time in your whole beautiful, ugly, and completely honest life that you’re not just reacting to the fire, you’re not just shedding a skin because it got too tight.
No. This time, you’re the one holding the goddamn matches. You’re choosing to burn the whole rotten, beautiful, fucked-up house to the ground, just to see what the sky looks like without a roof over your head.
You’re not running from anything anymore.
You’re finally, after fifty-seven goddamn years, just… running.
And that, my friend, that’s the only lesson that was ever worth a damn.
