Loathing

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- Tails -

There are always two sides to a coin and where it lands determines the future.

Everyone loved him except the one person he wanted to love him.

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Himself

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Everyone makes mistakes, and he was tired.  He had been drinking and entertaining the chaps at his club the night before.  The chaps always looked forward to these occasions and, in his vanity, so did he.  He knew all eyes would be on him, as they always were.  It was a theatre of his life that he had created.

Today he should have been getting his rest but Hugh was known as a bon viveur and he could not let his reputation let him down.

Today he let people down but, most of all, he let himself down.  It was just something that he would have to live with.  At least he had the opportunity to live. 

It was his adherence to his reputation that had clouded his judgement.  His reputation stuck to him. 

Everyone makes mistakes, especially when they are tired, especially when they do not give into sleep – when sleep is considered a weakness.  Sleep was what he desired and what he needed.  Sleep sharpens the brain. 

Today his brain was not sharp and he made a mistake.

A blunder.

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He wrote off her illness.  Hugh was a doctor.  It was his duty to prescribe and cure.  It was his duty to listen.  Today he was too tired to listen.  Hugh said it was a chest infection and prescribed anti-biotics. 

They solved everything.

Unfortunately, they did not solve her.

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People have heart attacks without ever realising.  Apparently, this is common.  They say that these are mild but, in reality, no heart attack is every mild.  The organ is damaged forever, as she was.  Hugh was too tired and too hungover to spot this.

It was no laughing matter.

None of her family were laughing.

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His life was full of laughter and people laughed it off but, to his mind, the joke was on him.  The theatre he had created had not been the theatre in which she took her last bow.

Exit stage left.

The chaps laughed with him but he only laughed at himself; at the fool he had become.

For years Hugh had always loved himself as much as others did.

Now, Hugh hated himself.

Because, despite the laughter, he had always taken himself seriously.  It was a secret from the chaps.

Life was not a joke – and, in his heart, Hugh always knew this.  He just presented he didn’t. Life should not be a pretence.

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Loathing.

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What the chaps did not know of Hugh, his hidden secret, was that when everyone laughed with Hugh, he cried.  He was not the person he could have been; he was not the person that everyone saw.  They did not look in the mirror.

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Hugh was his own worst enemy. 

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Tonight, as he left the club, leaving the chaps behind, his tail was between his legs.

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