The date, my last, January 14, 1891
My Darling Bea,
I’m truly sorry you had to find my remains as such, but I felt that taking my own life was the only way out of my gnawing madness–a madness I can neither contain nor accept; a madness that has stalked me since birth and was strained to the breaking point, strangely enough, by last summer’s dedication of the Ness County Bank building. By and by, a madness, I, myself, cannot comprehend nor explain away. Perhaps an account of this life compared to the one I lived a century apart may shed light on the matter.
I was born into this reality in a one-room sod house on a farm in western Kansas territory on February 3, 1856, two years after President Franklin Pierce signed into law the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Our nearest neighbors, the Pecks, lived three miles east. Ness City, the county seat where our family would hitch up the wagon and ride to every other Saturday for supplies, was fifteen. We would leave early in the morning, get home around dusk. I always felt the intoxication of the city even though it was just a few ramshackled hovels and a two-block long business district with a wooden boardwalk. Returning home to the wide open plains was suffocating.
As a child my only friends were the chickens raised for eggs and Sunday dinners, and the cows and hogs that were later slaughtered to sustain us through brutal Kansas winters. For entertainment, I chased a metal hoop with a stick. You and I were classmates. We fell in love, married, had Joey, Dottie, Pearl, Martha, Scottie, and Wyatt. I continued to farm the land after Dad died–140 acres of infertile dust–with a one-bottom plow and an ox. We built our wood- frame house, settled in, had family sing-alongs in the parlor with you playing the piano your parents bought us for a housewarming gift—Stephen Foster ditties and Christian hymns, mostly. We lived a simple life. A quiet life. A double life, you can concur, after reading this confession of sorts.
Yes I was born, raised, and spent this entire life too many miles outside Ness City, Kansas; yet, my dear Bea, I also quite distinctly recall being born in Lenox Hill Hospital on New York City’s Upper East Side, on October 11, 1991. I died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27. Strangely and most regrettably, I did not reincarnate into a future life, but regressed into this one somehow.
I knew, even back in the soddie–oh Darling, that dark, dank, musty, dirt–floored soddie!--that I had lived this other life of privilege in a high-rise condo pampered with nannies. I cried myself to sleep as a baby, not because I was cranky or hungry, but because of the ghastly discomfort of the cradle Dad had hewn from a cottonwood stump. I cried for my cushioned bassinette!
In the private school I attended, lessons were displayed on a digital whiteboard projected by an LCD screen attached to a computer that allowed (will allow?) educators to control software directly from a large display. We used not pencils, but keyboards . . . a panel of little plastic squares with all the letters of the alphabet on each, much like today’s newfangled typewriters but hooked up by a wire! To wit, a highly advanced version of today’s magic lanterns. Textbooks will become illuminated electronic tablets-–hard to believe now, since the use of electricity is still in its infancy. Did you ever wonder why a lowly one-room schoolhouse with lessons scratched out with chalk bored me so?
Before my earthly departure, I want to tell you of a few more wonders to come: tent shows of light will be projected from a box in every parlor. In only twelve years two brothers will defy gravity in a flying machine. (In my other time, jet aircraft will be capable of ferrying almost four hundred passengers coast-to-coast in less than six hours!) In 1969, two American astronauts will walk on the moon. An invisible web called the internet will connect everyone on Earth! Music will be carried on waves to mass audiences; a series of photographs will be strung together to create an illusion of animation called motion pictures—grand entertainment apart from the Ness County fair for three days in August.
My confessions are thus: Oh! my Dear! those times around the piano singing minstrel tunes and Jesus songs were quite disconcerting to a non-racist atheist! You considered everybody screeching off-key a pleasant leisure; to me, it was torture to my soul. I secretly, desperately, longed for my iPhone, PlayStation, laptop, and ear buds blasting Coldplay. Do you not see my dilemma, Darling? I was a self-absorbed, cultured, 21st-century technophile, single in Manhattan with rolls of money, no offspring, no responsibilities who was yanked back as this poor 19th-century dirt farmer with a wife and a cramped house full of children. That was a masquerade, as well, Bea, for I often despised those of you who encroached upon my carefree bachelorhood. That heavy pretense of being a happy family man has finally been lifted!
But I digress. As mentioned at the outset, the construction of the Ness County Bank is what compelled me to take my life. Oh how the locals from far and wide come to gawk at this four-story edifice and proudly dub it ‘the skyscraper of the plains”. Skyscraper? Ha! The stone building mocked me continually with haunting memories of a future New York City and my preferred state of existence. Since this dismal existence must be your God’s idea of hell, I decided to take my chances on the next one. Fair thee well!
Your betrothed, Issac
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If you or anybody you know are suffering through a ‘gnawing madness’, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, It’s a United States-based suicide prevention network of over 200+ crisis centers that provides 24/7 service via a toll-free hotline with the number 9-8-8. It is available to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress. The Lifeline supports people who call for themselves or someone they care about. Peace out.
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