Apocalyptic Disorder.

Gabriel wrote of forbidden pathways and failed entrances. His relationships were love-hate. Passion is the answer to monotony. In this way, it was ironic how he held cognacs close to his pen.

He never noticed anyone's attentive glance, nor the curious elongated ones.

He rarely even noticed me.

I was merely a comic relief to him. Some distraction from his otherwise artistically-driven life.

Maybe he didn't notice it, but I did.

Oh, but don't get the impression he was reclusive or introverted. He was a vocal soul when his heart was in it, but those days were separated by a great divide of indifference. Sometimes he came off as hostile. Sometimes a little conceited, but those are labels. Stereotypes. Brands people put on other people for the sake of branding. Like it's an art form. People must name things. They cannot stand the thought of something remaining a mystery.

Well, what happens when you discover the secret of the universe and find you're too late to save it? You're mighty screwed then, aren't you? No fun in the world anymore, is there, when you've identified the detonation switch.

You know, I have read books of rich calibre, of classical structure, of blunt prose, of metaphoric complexity, of mindless intellect. Yet, I don't feel I'm any closer to the world then I was before. Maybe I understand things more, maybe. But I don't feel any closer to humanity, itself. I think it was the same for Gabriel. He never was an ordinary boy. Even when I met him in second grade. Always off on his own with a pen and his dull green journal. I was much the same with my worn Lewis Carroll books. I guess we sort of bonded in our fondness for literature. He told me about his stories and I told him about mine. What I learnt from each book, I described with as much detail as I could muster and through that, he seemed to nod in understanding. In a sense using what I told him to build on his fictitious worlds.

He was a genius with a pen. Once he started, he couldn't be disturbed. Like when I used to visit him in his dark hollow of a room, if he was writing in that nook between the minimalist walls and his unmade bed, he wouldn't acknowledge my existence.

He was racing time, stalling the inevitability of responsibility. His mother wasn't impressed. His grades were below average and tittering on failure. Mary always asked me to talk some sense into him, to make him comprehend what he was doing to his future. I told her I would.

I didn't.

I knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to live his life before it got pulled out from under him. He wanted to write. It was a craving that never ended. An addiction so skewered into his genetic make-up that searching for any hobby to eclipse it would have been a fruitless use of energy.

I didn't question his moods.

When an ending or a plot twist he'd concocted didn't turn out the way he'd envisioned it to, he got mad. He got impossible to be around. Every swirl of emotion was a passionate, all-consuming one. Fairies only have room for one emotion at a time.

Now, as I sit on my snow-sleeked steps, I watch the flakes fall onto sidewalks with runaway shoppers clad in their designer coats with phones in their ears, living in virtual reality. A taxi blows its horn as a crammed SUV blocks its way as it's reversing. I convulse in the cold and wrap my scarf tightly about my neck. I can feel the rigorous pumping of hot blood to my veins to constitute for the mind's foolish will for arctic enclosure. I can see a hardcover book in a window from across the street in the old bookstore I love. It's nothing eye-catching, nothing interesting to tell of what it is incasing but I stare at it as if it were. Because it is.

I read the inscription this morning.

To Lewis Carroll, without whose wit and charm, I never would have met the person who inspired this and transposed imaginings into fruition.

His sole book was for me. This was the only one, out of hundreds of others, that he ever put to publish before his inevitable death from a long drawn out disease.

He never told me about it, I guess he never wanted me to know.

I feel my chapped lips forming a sort of lopsided smile at the rectangular object in the window as an overwhelming sadness catches my lungs unprepared and I head back into the apartment behind me.

The story was a masterpiece, critically acclaimed and everything. Beauty simply oozed from its pages, but I wouldn't read it. Of all the books I have stored in my mind in the past, this one... This one will remain a mystery.

What happens when you have discovered the secrets of the universe, only to find you're too late to save it?

You no longer find the lure in knowledge. You put away your chemicals and your apparatus toys. Then, well. Then you write a book.