The Final Letter

Are you there God? It's me, Jesus. Actually, my name is Paul, but wasn't Paul one of Jesus' friends - apostles, if you will? Anyway... Paul Schmidt, he is me, and I is him. I'm writing to you because I read somewhere online that if you list out all your problems in a letter to someone it helps get them off your chest. Well, I have a lot of problems, and strangely enough I seem to have them all with you, Mr. God. I have spent my adult life holed up in a cathedral, trying to be your servant, but here I sit in a pew, writing this letter in black ink on an old piece of paper, staring up at your real son on the wall. He's a little pudgy. Perhaps he should've eaten something besides fish, bread, and wine. Y'know what? The wine was a good idea. I've got a little in me right now, and I have to say these words are just flying off the page...

Sorry, I just paused to take a sip. It's a carménère. It goes down a little spicy, but every time it catches in my throat I follow it up with a nice draft of gin and it's alright. I'm kidding about the gin; it's just old vodka mixed with water...

Well, if you are who I say you are, then you already know why I'm writing. Maybe you can also hear the shells and the bullets flying around outside. Maybe you can hear the sounds of war pierce the night as men die begging you for life and screaming for their mothers, who after all, are the only gods we know on this earth. There is a father tonight who has looked his last on his children; a mother who will never see her husband come home, and who must comfort her kids through the most bitter nights, when the stars are veiled and the darkness seals them in like the lid of a coffin. Likewise there is a man who will fight tooth and nail for his family, only for them to be wiped out by a mortar before he can get home. Then there will be no one to comfort him, and he will fight with the fury of a man who wants to die. Where then will you be, God? Where then will you be...

My own life wasn't supposed to go this way. I was supposed to go to college for creative writing. I grew up in this city, and I was going to write a novel about it. It was a quaint town before the war hit - you would've liked it. Little coffee shops, open markets, and all the bureaucracy you'd expect in a place like this. Gridlock, traffic, the whole package. I was going to leave to pursue my dreams. I was going to meet a girl in college. We were going to fall in love. She would be a few inches shorter than me; we'd work independently so we could stay at home and see each other constantly...

Then we'd have a child, about three years after we got married, and we'd raise him (our first would be a boy, our second a girl), on good values. He'd grow up and want to be just like me at first, until he thought the idea appalling like I ended up thinking of my father's business. He'd probably end up being an engineer or something pragmatic like that. His name would be Julian Schmidt. My daughter, who was going to come four years after him, would have been named Ellie. They would've lived long, loving, and wholesome lives with their own partners, and my wife and I were going to die peacefully in our old age, just one day apart...

***

There once was a winter king, who ruled in a palace of ice and who was crowned with a wreath of holly. He lived in the palace his whole life, and he was told that if he left the snow terrible things would happen. He followed the rules; he married someone of the winter kingdom and they had three loveless children. His wife looked upon him with cold eyes, and his children spent all their time away from him. One day, late in his life, he decided to venture out into the night while his family slept in their separate rooms. He went out to the border of the winter kingdom, where the snow met the strange green grass, which to him looked like a stabbing splash of color on his usual pale canvas. Well, beyond the grass his perceptive eyes spied a young woman near a river. She was sleeping then, but her golden hair splayed out on the grass reflected the beauty of a summer sun such as he had never seen before; after all, in the winter kingdom the summer sun is a hazy, sickly ball of yellow which seems ready to leave before it arrives. Her face is tan and full of life, and her body hides teasingly under a simple, purple satin dress...

The king realizes he's madly in love with her. He hides behind a rock and waits until sunrise, confident that when she wakes and sees him there she'll fall in love with him too. Sunrise comes, she wakes up, her brown eyes fluttering open, and the king freezes; he doesn't know what to say to her. She begins singing as she completes her daily tasks, and the melody falls like the feathers of a late autumn snowfall on his ears. He runs back to his kingdom before his family wakes up, but from then on he resolves to escape every night and see this woman. He does exactly this for a fortnight, and unbeknownst to him he inches closer each time, bringing the winter just a little further south. She moves away from the cold, which only entices him...

One day, about a month later, he gets into a fight with his wife. Something trivial about the dinner, but in his mind he's thinking of the girl in the purple dress and loathing that he should be subject to sitting across from this witch while his love sleeps on the ground by a river. That night, he goes to see her again. This time, he moves closer to her while she's sleeping, ignoring the creeping frost on the grass by his feet. He finds himself kneeling near the face of the love of his life. Her cheeks slope gently from high peaks under her eyes down to a strong jawline. Her lips are full under a sharp and slightly upturned nose. She breathes gently in her sleep. Mindlessly, the king reaches a delicate hand down and touches a finger to her cheek...

She gasped as she woke up, her eyes turning from brown to icy blue, and the rest of her body followed suit, freezing over and becoming rigid in a matter of seconds. A cold wind rushed out of the north, taking away the last syllable from her mouth, eternally locked open as frost spread across her skin, hardening soon into thick ice, even around her golden hair, which ended in sharp icicles flying into the wind. The king stood in horror for a full day, rooted to the spot as winter closed in around him. The next night, when he realized what he'd done, he broke off a long piece of the woman's frozen hair and planted it into the ground. He looked up at the stars, the tears solidifying on his face before they could fall off his jaw, and wondered what he had done to deserve this fate. The king took one last look at his love and threw himself upon the icicle of her hair, ending his life, and next to the river they both lay, waiting to be swallowed by a winter storm...

***

Sorry, these sips are getting longer. The ground just shook next to me and blew out a window in the church. Why did I tell you that little story? Well, surely you should know, God. You should know I wrote that in a high school short story contest and won with flying colors. You should know that my teacher and I worked religiously (no pun intended), to submit that short story to a literary magazine, and yet after a full semester's work, we were unsuccessful. If you know both these things, you should be able to deduce why I put it in this letter. No? You can't? Well, that's because it was completely random! Ha! My life isn't determined by you, nor are my decisions. I could write a thousand z's in a row and you couldn't stop me. You'd just have to listen to every single one with the rapt attention I'm sure you give to all your children! Shall we do that? Maybe...

Or maybe not. I don't know what got into me - I mean, it could very well be your will that I write that little short story, thereby making all my decisions-

Sorry! The building collapsed a little by the altar. Some of the roof fell. What was I saying? Oh, yes; I can be as random as I want, but it could still be just what you want me to do. That's another problem I have with you, y'know? So annoying...

Well, needless to say, I didn't get the college dream I told you about earlier. The war started just as I graduated high school. I had to rescind my admission. My father handed me a gun and told me I had to fight to defend my home. Who was I to deny him? I enlisted in the military, but when I saw they had an opening for a pastor-at-war, so to speak, I jumped all over it. I'm a coward. I didn't even fight back in school when James Bishop took my favorite truck at recess. That was in the first grade, but still...

My parents both went to fight, as did my younger brother. They were dead within a week. I wept as I never had before; the fighting had not yet reached my city. We had time. If we'd escaped into the south, we may have made it out of the country. I cried to you, God. I spoke to you on the coldest nights and on the hottest days. I never stopped speaking to you - who else was there to comfort me? The father at this cathedral was not as craven as I. He fought in the war like my parents and died a year after them. He was an antisocial jerk anyway...

I used to pray for illness, did you know? Well, look who I'm talking to; of course you know that. It's true, though. I used to lay awake at night, hearing the fighting come closer and closer to the city, just praying I contracted some disease which ended my life soon. As is par for the course for me, I did not contract any such disease. I remained a devout servant of yours for... Oh, I'd say two years. After that I started drinking. The war came close and went away again. It did that several times over the last four years. Occasionally people would come in here seeking to speak in the ear of God, and I did what I could for them, which after all wasn't much. I'm sure you heard them, but then again, you're pretty busy orchestrating these wars, aren't you? Well, no more listening! After tonight there will be no one to whom I can listen. This city will fall, and everyone here will have died for nothing. Oh sure, if some miracle happens and we win in the end, they'll say we didn't die for nothing, but what comfort is that to the souls lost in battle, or to the widows and orphans I spoke of earlier...?

The wine is drained. You'll notice I said "we" when referring to the death of everyone in our city, as though I were planning on joining them. Well, you'd be correct for once in your eternal life! Now of course, I don't plan on grabbing the gun on the pew next to me and charging out into the night. I'm not Ares, after all. No, I decided to sneak out a copious amount of painkillers from the infirmary before it was stormed by enemy forces last week. I've got them right on top of the gun, and as soon as I get done with this letter, I'll down them with the rest of this vodka, and if all goes right I'll be gone before this building collapses...

You're not even going to try and talk me out of it, God? I mean if there was ever a time to send a sign down from the heavens for Paul Schmidt, it's now. No? Just more gunfire? Alright...

What else is there to tell, God? Am I lengthening this letter to prolong my life? Hardly. I was going to do it before writing this letter, but then there was a chance that I meet you at the gates and while you're judging me I don't know what to say back to you, but now that I've got it in this letter, I'll have it right on the top of my mind as I stroll towards you on the clouds. Plus, since I'm writing it before I die, you should already be aware of its contents. That's how the whole "omniscience" thing works, right? I mean, there's a chance you don't exist at all and I'm just writing this to no one, wasting my time and risking painful death with every word I write, for nothing. Isn't that comforting...

I guess another reason I keep writing is that I don't have good "last words" picked out. I mean, there's no one in this city who isn't hiding, fighting, or dead, so there's no one but you to listen to my last words. I'm not going to talk out loud to myself like some madman before I take down these pills, so I need my last words to be on this page. Let me take a drink while I figure it-

Alright, never mind! The ground just shook and bullets just blew through the wall to my left, breaking three windows and tearing into solid wooden pews. I guess there's no time for last words. Fitting, I suppose, that even death has no fairness, though maybe it was folly on my part by looking for justice there. Well, God, I will see you in a few minutes. If you aren't real, if instead it's reincarnation, I hope I get reincarnated as someone far away from this war, where I can live the life I dreamed for myself here. If nothing is real - if there's just an empty void out of which I was born and into which I shall now return... Well, that won't be so bad, would it? A life is a terrible thing to waste, though. Au Revoir, God.