One-Shot Wednesdays -Transmogrify (Patreon)

Thank you to patron Lauren for the prompt again for this week:

Anger. That’s what all of this leads to. Frankly, it’s exhausting.

How does someone go from writing: “you’re all such great mates I’m so glad I met you! Can’t wait to see you all again!” to writing literally nothing at all mere weeks later? Astounding.

And yet, the strange truth.

Okay is the dude dead? Did something bad happen? What? you ask. I asked myself the same thing. But he was alive alright. Social media posts at least once a month (as per usual) and a couple of us friends have spotted him while out and about the last few years: we’d see him driving in his vehicle or see his silhouette in the curtains of his house.

“So go confront the bastard!” you say. Well what for? There are only so many times you can send a text or an email or try calling someone and never receive a response before you get the bloody hint! And going to his house would just do what?

People change –we all get that or at least most of us do. It’s a fact of life. People change, people grow apart, people grow closer together. But the biggest mystery of my life thus far has been: how does a person change so bloody much in the changing of winter to spring that they stop talking to you; acting like you were never mates in the first place?

I could see it if we were still in school. People change crowds abruptly and then act like a snob or whatever. They blow you off for others or make a scene and embarrass you and have a falling out.

But this is our twenties and there was no big ‘falling out’. Like I said he writes something nice in the Christmas journal after a really nice get-together and then suddenly BAM you discover that was the last thing the bloke would ever write to ya. Several years of friendship that almost made it to a decade in fact and suddenly the man strangely and shockingly transmogrifies into this... stranger.

You ever heard Keane? We might as well be living in another town, we might has well be living in another world—yeah that’s basically that to a tee.

My granddad always talked about suspicious things being put in the water before I was born and before his father was born—he said chemicals testing went on long before any World War tried to use it. Sometimes I like to think of what happened was a result of all that: one of your best mates got a bad glass of water at a relative’s out of town one day and fried his bloody brains without knowing it. Forgot ya and the entire lot of ya as friends. Makes you feel a tad better though not much.

Or maybe he’s been replaced by a replicant.

Or maybe...maybe he had a twin that was locked away in the attic none of us ever knew about and that twin switched him like that film Man in the Iron Mask.

Or maybe he was a spy and he has to protect us from getting hurt so he can’t let anyone know he was ever friends with us lot. Should receive a secret message confirming the truth any day now...

Or just maybe he was a villain spy for some Western European organization and had to gain our trust and get some valuable information from us and now that he’s done that the mission’s over.

Or maybe the man’s a liar: that phrase he wrote in the card was to keep up the charade but then come New Year the laughs behind our backs wore off and the joke wasn’t funny no more. Why waste your time with dull idiots?

Or perhaps maybe some people in this world just change without rhyme or reason that you’ll ever know about or understand and they don’t owe you an explanation of why their lives are going on with new chapters without you. Even though all you want is to just pry the truth because without it you are so angry and confused and hurt like a dog left at the trash bins. And being hurt without rhyme or reason really makes you angry because you’re too proud to feel like you did something wrong –and there was no evidence that you did anything wrong.

All of the anger is exhausting but without the ability to accept that lack of truth and move on it’s all we’ve got. It’s all I’ve got.