Dissonance

I know - well, knew - a guy who was fundamentally damaged inside somehow. A bright fellow, really. Inspiring guy, but something was wrong - he had this inward stare that you could just barely detect on the distant edge of perception. He was looking at something that we just couldn't see.

One day, he ended up dead. Froze to death in his car, which is a stupid way to go.

Some of the people who knew him said that it was proof that he was a fool, sort of a way of yanking him off his pedestal after he was dead. "Figures," they said, "we always knew he wasn't that smart." In a way, they're right - he'd rolled down a window, exposing himself to the cold that much more.

I still wonder. I mean, I think that he wanted to die, and found a way to do it in such a way that people couldn't say specifically whether it was suicide or an accident. I think he wanted people to think, "Gee, what an idiot," because that's how he saw himself, and he couldn't bear the pressure of not being an idiot, somehow. He wanted to mar his own image, sort of.

I just can't resolve his death with his life. They don't fit. It doesn't feel right. He knew. He had to. It doesn't make sense that a man who thought about life as one thinks about chess, planning for possibilities and eventualities, would do something so simple as die in a car from cold. It's too simple for him to roll up the window, isolate himself until someone came by to help. There's a dissonance in how he died, a sort of final signature.

Beware.