Fate Is Just A Word

I don't know what to feel.

I just stared at that first sentence for five minutes and wondered where to go with it and honestly, I'm still at a loss. How many different ways can The Fates toy with us? How many different and fucked up and awful ways for us to lose can they think up?

I'm struggling here. When I think about the game today, my brow furrows and my mouth hangs open, stupid and vaguely primitive. I look like a damn fool, but that's okay because I feel like one too.

Am I supposed to be happy? Certainly, there was something different about that game, something that for the first time this season felt like real, definable progress. And yet, somehow, that made the end that much worse. It made the pain that much more unbearable because yet again, fool that I am, I found myself opening up to possibility. I smiled at Hope even though he beat my ass, tied me to the bedposts, naked and gibbering, while he rummaged through my drawers and closets, robbed me blind and then took a shit on my living room floor the last time I let him in the house.

It's okay, Baby, I know that you love me. It's my fault. I'll be better this time, I promise. And then Hope took me in his arms, looked me lovingly in the eyes, kissed me deeply and my heart soared. He then told me to lay back and I smiled and listened and felt content . . . and then he tied me to the bedposts, naked and gibbering, he rummaged through my drawers and closets, robbed me blind and took a shit on the living room floor. Hope, you vicious asshole!

I'm still not sure what to say. I'm still trying to process the extreme schizophrenia that was that game against the Packers. It all started simply enough, with the Packers firebombing the Lions like they were the Dresden Lions and all was orderly and sad and pathetic, but hell, at least it was what we knew would happen, right? But then the Lions fought back. They marched themselves down the field and I began to wonder if you can fight fate after all. Then Jahvid Best fell down and the Packers intercepted the ball and it turns out that no, you cannot.

But there is an honor, a nobility, in the fight itself. Even if you know that you're doomed. Even if you know that at the end you will just be laying on your back, spitting out blood bubbles and saddling up the ol' spirit horse, you can at least go down fighting. And that's how I felt. I didn't have hope. Not really. I didn't believe, because the world hates me and I don't get what I want. But I still was proud of the fight, proud that we actually drew our guns and fired back instead of hiding in the horse trough only to be found and drowned in a pool of our own piss once the fight was finished.

It seemed honorable, to accept death but fight it anyway. There was a certain sort of freedom in it all, like the end result didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was that we would die with our guns in our hands and a million bullets in our bodies and they'd have to have a closed casket ceremony for us because we were utterly ruined and Goddammit, they would say, those boys took that shit to the end.

So there was pride, and somehow, even though we were just standing in the streets, exposed and dead already, we were still standing. And that's when it hit me: holy shit, we might actually do this.

And then pride went out the window and I screamed at the sun "I want to live!" But the sun is just a big ball of gas and doesn't give a shit what I want.

Four times the Lions settled for field goals in the second half. They only needed one more. If they were five yards closer on their final drive, they could have attempted a field goal that would have given them a one point lead, a lead which would have been their first of the game. If Brandon Pettigrew wouldn't have dropped those passes. If Charles Woodson would have been called for pass interference. If Shaun Hill scrambles for six instead of throwing the ball away. If we didn't take 673 penalties for 12 billion yards. If we weren't the Detroit Lions. If if if if if.

The agony of waking up and realizing that fate is an option, a choice, and not a grim and inviolable sentence handed down from above, only to be fatally shot a moment later is a unique and horrible one. It is an agony that is so acute that it exists in only a short, mournful breath, a breath in which hope and fear and panic and pride and dread and glory and heaven and hell all exist at the same time. It is there and in that moment you feel all of these things and it tears you apart because you feel the space in between, you know what it's like to live in a world where all things are possible and where life and death are only a razor blade apart, and it hurts so much to know that you are a part of that world and that you could have had it all but instead all you got was a bullet to the gut and the death that you had told yourself would be your fate all along. It could have been different, but it wasn't.

And really, that's what this all comes down to: it could have been different, but it wasn't. Sure, sure, there are a million different things you can complain about, a million different reasons, a million different moments that you will play back in your head and wonder what if, and we'll beat these things to death this week, but for now, all we have is that desolate and terrible and yet beautiful knowledge that we could have lived all along, we just didn't know it. There is freedom in the certainty of death and there is fear and confusion in the chaos of possibility. I don't know how I feel. I don't know. I just know that things could have been different, but they weren't. That crushes me and yet fills me with hope. It makes me cry and weep and scream at the sun and yet it makes me believe in tomorrow. The Detroit Lions lost to the Green Bay Packers 28-26 and we died just like we expected to, but we also lived, and for a moment, fate was just a word and the world was opened up in front of us and all we had to do was run, run, run . . .