on failure

“I hope you’re happy,” Failure mumbles glumly, slumping over the rusted railing. The sea is restless tonight, shifting irritably, prowling along its shores. The faint spray rests lightly on the bridge of Failure’s nose, and he shuts his eyes heavily. Exhaustion pulses in him like a second heartbeat, rattling his bones and pounding at the sides of his skull. He has never felt young, and nights like this only worsen the brittleness in his body, until he feels fragile enough to fall into a million little pieces at the brush of a feather.

“Of course I’m happy,” the universe replies, wringing out a nebula and pinning it up with stars to dry. The air smells vaguely of raspberry rum and burned steak, a acrid combination that makes Failure hunch further so the bar digs into his thin chest. His stomach is rolling like the spasmodic seas. “Have you ever seen me anything but?”

“No, never.” Failure opens his eyes and straightens up. His bones ache, and the damp air is biting at the back of his neck through his ratty scarf, slipping through the holes in his overcoat to caress his frozen flesh with ice-cold claws. The universe is never unhappy. She is giddy and obnoxious and often drunk, sometimes frustrating and sometimes so awesome and terrifying that the only recourse he has available is to sink to his knees and cower, hoping against hope she does not deign to notice to notice him in his squalid blandness. The universe is stunning and straightforwardly blunt and gleefully irritating, but by nature, she is happy, and never anything sad in the least.

“Why did you have to make me like this, though?” he asks her forlornly as she tugs down the Orion nebula and scowls at it, pulling at the sides to stretch out the dense clumps of gas and matter. “Why am I just so terrible? I try and I try, but everyone curses me and avoids me. I can never do anything right. I drive people to death and destruction and despair.”

“Well, for starters, I didn’t make you,” the universe retorts, stuffing the crumpled nebula into her washbin and dumping a liberal amount of starstuff on top. “You’re an inevitability, like taxes and Death.”

“Oh wow, was that suppose to make me feel better?”

She shrugs, flicking a gaseous curl out of her supernova eyes. Most of her locks are pinned back with an asterism that Time had given her a long time ago, their winking sparkle barely visible through the mess piled on top of her head. “It’s a fact, Failure. And if I wanted to talk to a crapehanger, I’d have invited Love or Death here instead of you.”

He slumps back down, slamming his chin down on top of the icy railing. His back screeches unhappily about the angle, and his teeth feel oddly pained - he has the tendency to grind them when worried, which is always. Across the bay, brilliant city lights gleam happily, forcing away the night. His sister is somewhere in that mass of humanity, sprinkling the miracles people pray for: promotions and letters of acceptance, award-winning ideas and worldshakingly powerful midnight revelations. Failure spends a lot of time dwelling morosely on his twin sister, analyzing why she is Success and he is not. It’s an riddle with no answer, but one he searches for endlessly anyway.

“Don’t sulk, Failure,” the universe sighs, draping the freshly-scrubbed nebula over Orion’s belt. “I didn’t make you, but I can say you weren’t meant to be a punishment for anyone.” She wipes her glistening hands off on her endless skirts, and offers him a cheery smile. He ignores it, hunching further over until the railing is pressed up against the ridge of his nose. The far-off city seems shrouded through the curtain of his dark hair, and he wonders what his sister is doing. Charming someone without even trying, perhaps, as effortless in her interactions with those around her as she is with everything else.

His sister is his mirror, his flipped image, but everything about her is perfected, the counterpoint to his faults and flaws. His boniness is awkward, all juts and angles, the type borne by those naturally skinny and enhanced by a forgetful, tense nature that is prone to forgetting sustenance. Hers is willowy and smoothly elegant, without the sudden ends and points that define him - instead, she has sleek lines and gentle curves. Her looks inspire poetry and prose, songs and stories; he’s heard her compared to Aphrodite and angels without irony. His features are hers masculinized enough to be polarizing; no one can agree if he is handsome or hideous. With Success, there is no question. With Failure, there is nothing but doubt.

He feels antsy in his own skin, as if it is two sizes too large, or perhaps one too small. His hands are grotesquely large, the curve of his spine like a snapped question mark. He feels like he wears his body uncomfortably, as if he can never tug it into place. Success, however, wears her oversized hands and abrupt angles with an easy grace that Failure both adores and loathes her for. People typically either ignore him or barely tolerate him - Success, like with everything, is both brilliantly noticeable and frustratingly arrogant, yet no one ever would shove her into the corner.

His existence is to be the background to his sister’s spotlight, cursed and reviled and ignored. No one wants him, everyone craves her. This, more than anything else, is all the proof that Failure needs that the universe doesn’t give a damn about fairness.

“Failure?” the universe asks, her hands absently smoothing out a fold in the outskirts of the Orion nebula.

“I just don’t understand how you can say I’m not a punishment,” he tells the silver-streaked waves prowling the bay. “It sure feels like it sometimes.”

He feels more than hears the universe sigh - a gentle tremor, running through the air, and the night suddenly dims at the edges as if she dropped a curtain on it.

“I am one of only a small number of living universes,” she says, picking at the dusty edge of Sirius with a forced contemplation that feels bitter and brittle. “There are more failures than successes - it is the way things go. Sometimes, it’s just impossible to make it.”

“Yeah, now you’re really not helping.”

“Because I haven’t made my point yet; shut up.” The universe’s glare burns into his neck like a focused ray of sunlight. Failure does not even try to fight the urge to just crumple to his knees and lean his head against the bars of the railing, the sea before him grabbing greedily at the silver-streaked moonlight. It’s inevitable that he would be a coward along with everything else. “Success is what everyone wants, yes, but no one gets there without you, Failure.”

He does not move, just huffs and watches the way the breeze displaces his bangs.

“Success is built on what people learn from you. You’re meant to show them how to get to where they want to go, to humble the arrogant, to season the inexperienced. If there is no threat of failure, there is no reason to strive for success. In fact-“ and here, the universe bends down until she fills up the entire sky, her supernovas all he can see when he peers up through his eyelashes and messy bangs, “-you’re the whole reason humanity exists the way they do at all.”

He tilts his head back, stares up at her. His mouth is open, and he is quite aware that he looks a little moronic with his jaw slack and his eyes bulging. His sister, with the same expression, would appear reverent and inspired. He merely looks like a dumbfounded kindergartner who just saw a larger kid grind a butterfly into the sidewalk - too young to understand death, old enough to know cruelty.

The universe, however, is not even looking at him. Humming off-key, she is pulling at the corners of the Red Square nebula, stretching out its crimson sides until it fills the evening sky. Failure hauls himself to his unsteady feet, the icy bite of the iron railing the only thing keeping him standing.

“You can’t just say that and stop there,” he protests. His voice sounds a little weak, too soft - Failure spends most of his time trying to not catch anyone’s attention. Maybe by nature he was not quiet, but necessity - or his perception of it; what the world needed from him to let him go on surviving.

The universe hears him anyway. She always does.

“I thought I was perfectly clear,” she remarks, raising her eyebrow at him. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell if the universe is being serious or just trying to mess with him. Those who think that she follows a set path of reason and logic are fools, Failure decides. The universe has her own logic, but he suspects no one will ever understand it besides her.

“No, you weren’t. That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

She heaves a dramatic sigh and flings the Red Square nebula into the arching black sky. “Oh, fine. I’ll put this in soundbites. Something nice and snappy.” She settles back into the night like a queen, her curls lazily drifting around her round face. “In the beginning, humans were just trying to survive. Failure was about not finding food, or being killed. But as they advanced, so did the stakes. Kingdoms could be toppled, or whole clans wiped out. The lives of many depended on the actions of a few. As the potential for success grew, that ability to be grander than anyone who had come before, so did the chances of failure.”

She smiles at him, and he wonders if perhaps she is drunker than he had originally thought. “You were their motivation, Failure. They learned from you, learned what not to do, and fought to outwit you. Without you, would they have reached the moon, built towers that scrape the clouds from the sky, tried to discover my inner workings? You up the stakes. You add oil to their fires. You are the keystone on which humanity depends - there is no room for change or adventure or dreams without the risk of failure.”

“Are you trying to make me feel better?” he asks suspiciously. Mercy and compassion are not among the virtues the universe can claim to possess. Death is usually told to grin and bear it, Love to stop sulking, Time to not dwell on events that, for everyone else, have not yet come to pass. When it comes to others’ problems, the universe hardly ever bothers with empathy.

“I never try to make anyone feel any better or worse about themselves when they ask for the honest truth,” the universe replies. “I just tell them what I see and how I see it. How they feel about it is their own damn business.”

He slumps back onto the railing, head hanging. “So why do they curse me?” he says quietly, rubbing at burning eyes with freezing hands.

“Some people aren’t ready for you,” the universe tells him, as kindly as she is capable of. “They don’t understand why what you’re offering isn’t the end of the world, or why they shouldn’t fear a failure. They don’t see your presence as room for growth, or as a chance for introspection. You’re a threat to them, to their lives and their perception of themselves, and they curse you because they don’t know how to use the lessons you give them.” He can hear her uncapping the flask of moonshine she carries with her everywhere - he never understood why she drinks as much as she does, but he has never seen the universe in any state but tipsy. “Now, the mature ones know that what you’re bringing to the table is a blessing,” she continues after a long moment. “They know that you’re giving them the chance to analyze who they are and who they want to be, what they want to accomplish and why. You temper them, strengthen them, hand them the tools to meet their goals the next time they set out.”

He looks up, hair tickling the back of his numb neck. The universe fills the sky, gleaming with the pinpricks of light from a thousand suns.

She is smiling at him, and her supernovas look like a promise, not a threat. “You’re the most human out of all of us, Failure,” she says. “You, with your doubts and your blindness to your strengths and hyperawareness of your flaws and desire to be something you’re not without realizing that reality functions better with you being just the way you are. Sometimes, I think you’re better equipped to deal with life than we are.”

Suddenly, she jumps to her feet, hair a swirl around her face. Failure can see the sparkling edge of her flask tucked into her waistband. “Well, I’m afraid I must be off,” she declares, gathering her skirts in one hand. “Time and I are going for a stroll along the arm of the Milky Way. Don’t wait up. And if you see Life, tell him he’s a jackass and I know he took the last of my good concentrated dark matter. Toodle-loo!”

She is gone then, in a swirl of fire and gas, leaving confused comets drifting bewilderedly in her wake. Failure opens his mouth - maybe to call after her, maybe to shriek his frustration at the heavens - but nothing seems to want to come out.

So he closes it, and stares at the city across the bay, with the million dancing lights and the glow of his sister. Without the universe, it feels chillier here than it had moments before, and he draws his coat tighter around his skinny body.

“I’m the force behind this all,” he mumbles to the night. Every breath he surrenders to the ink-black sky hovers in front of his face like an unhappy cloud, hoping it can push its way back into the warmth of his body. Then he sighs. “Yeah right.”

He turns up his frayed collar against winter’s clawed caress and shoves his stiff, bloodless fingers into the depths of his worn pockets. With one final glance at the lights skipping across the agitated sea, Failure turns on his heel and skulks into the night.