2 Steps behind

He had always been a rebel, he had wanted to soar across the crimson skies alone like a bird, and he had wanted to live life on his own terms. He had always been one of a kind the rock star the darling of millions living on the edge of an edgy lifestyle high on drugs, booze and mind numbing adulation. He had soaked in it all till he had met her. The world had seemed so different then, the rebel suddenly needed a cause, even birds settled down eventually he had told his friends sheepishly. She had been a light at the end of a dark tunnel, a tunnel he wouldn’t have minded crawling even if it meant ending up with bruised elbows, knees and egos. Unfortunately that light had been cruelly snubbed out and he now found himself staring into the dark tunnel of the barrel of a revolver.
He always thought it required a combination of glut of guts and paucity of brains to blow out either. But then it seemed like a really grand way to go out in style immortalized to all his fans. So he groped around his room feeling the metal in hands that had strummed out the best heavy metal in decades. The gun felt so darned cold as he put in against his head uncomfortably propped against the wall. He clicked the safety off as he stared up groggily at the lights in his room finally ready to blow out his own. As his fingers tensed up on the trigger he wondered if his life would flash in front of his eyes as he had heard. It did for a flicker but all he saw was her, no childhood memories, no happy pictures from his college days, no family portraits, no recollections of his metronomic rise to the greatest rock star ever, nothing, just a picture of her as she slept peacefully next to him in those best days of his life. Suddenly he was having second thoughts about going through with this, what if this wasn’t the right thing to do but hadn’t he always gone out of his way to do the wrong thing, could it be that he was he just plain scared?

As he was battling his thoughts the door bell rang. He decided to do a rethink as he got the door. It was some sort of delivery for him but as he signed the receipt he thought the person under the Fed Ex cap seemed familiar. But his head heavy and groggy from a night of drugs and alcohol couldn’t really tell. Just as he closed the door it suddenly hit him why the face seemed familiar. He rushed to the door and sure enough he found the necklace there. A necklace he had so hated as she had picked out two pieces from the store, but something that had grown to become his most valuable possession as he stared at an identical piece hanging from his neck.

She had always said ‘I’ll always be there for you’; he realized that she had truly meant it.