Fly on this wall, too

A prison cell, flickering hall lights fluorescing through bars, feeble flashes falling on faded paint, old concrete, filtering through a darkness more than physical.

The shadows of the prison bars fenced in Jacob Fisher more closely, following him when he walked, haunting him from one corner of the cramped cell to another, and trapping him on his bed as he sat and held his head in both hands in an effort to still his swimming mind. The world seemed to spin inside his head, whirling dizzily past and then clicking back into place only to swing by again, repeating the same pattern like a broken record or a dinging typewriter carriage. His eyes focused and his hands did not falter as he picked up pen and paper, but his brain seemed quite convinced that he was dizzy.

Jacob had never possessed anything more than a most rudimentary artistic talent, one that was rarely enough to commit to paper the images in his mind's eye. Now once again his inability tormented him as he wrote four names on the paper and recalled a face for each one. He could not draw any reasonable facsimile of the four women but he could see each one clearly, the physical features enhanced by his memory of each one's personality - the inner beauty shining through the outer beauty until the two intermingled indistinguishably. No one else looking at any of the four would see exactly the same thing that Jacob now imagined, a fact not lost on him as it furthered his frustration over his artistic impotence.

He surmised that he was hardly the only man to look back on women from his past with regrets. Better men than he had left behind bitter trails of lost love and heartbreak. Many of those same men had truly loved, truly cared for, and truly hurt a succession of different women. Who was not vulnerable to the difficulties, the obstacles, the painful wounds inherent in love's labors? Ah but along with this deep connection to all mankind came the desire to throw off the burden of similarity; the longing to search and find the ways that one was not just like every man and woman to have loved before now; to prove that the same mistakes had not been made once more with merely the names and faces changed while the foolishness remained constant. Perhaps it was a selfish wish to be better than everyone else, or perhaps it was a vain hope that humanity's ability to relate to itself was improving as a whole.

Fisher knew well the lessons he had learned from each one of these women, at different ages although he was still young. For each name, each regrettable loss he could list the ways he had matured and grown. The things God had taught him and grown in him from the seeds of his tragic romantic failures. He also knew that for each profitable deduction he had made out of his experience, he had turned a blind eye to a dozen or more far deeper truths. That was why he had to keep making these mistakes - to keep failing at the same thing until he learned the lesson God wanted him to learn.

His eyes closed in weariness, trying to shut off the feeling that the room was spinning. His thoughts turned again and again past the same landscape of memory as he tried to focus on the faces and figures who seemed so far off. Eventually his body sagged against the wall, his head hung heavy and sightless, and he gave up and fell to the springy matress with a squeak his ears never got a chance to translate to his brain.