The final confrontation.

As Steve walked up Ian’s driveway he could hear loud arguing coming from inside the house.

Oh good, Ian’s home.

Steve knocked on the door but later had to pound it with his fist to make his arrival heard above the tumultuous yelling between Ian and his parents. Finally, Steve hit the door so hard that there was a sound of thunder inside the house. Finally the arguing stopped as Ian’s mother answered the door.

“Oh, hello Steve,” Ian’s mother greeted, her voice sounding hoarse from hours of screaming.

“Let me guess,” Steve replied, “Ian’s home.”

“You’ve really caught us at a bad time.”

“I need to see Ian, please.” Steve said.

“Can you come back tomorrow?”

“I’ll see him now!” Steve yelled as he forced the door open and walked inside. There he saw Ian seated on the couch in the living room.

“What’s up, Steve?” Ian greeted with a tentative tone.

Steve paused. “What’s up? Is that what you just said? I’ll tell you what’s up.

“Remember our little meeting at Busskersons where you wished all those bad things on me? Do you know what happened to me after that? I lost my job that evening when I was suspected of stealing money from a safe. I couldn’t prove my innocence so I got fired.

“And then my wife left me. She told me she was seeing other men behind my back and was already pregnant at our wedding. That means my son is not my biological son. So I lost my family right there.

“Since I was out of work I could no longer make payments on my house and on my car, so I lost those as well. In fact I lost everything, just like you said.

“Then I moved back in with my parents back in Dusseldorf. My father concluded we could no longer continue living in Germany with his retirement money and me being out of work, so he put the house up for sale, the very house my parents lived in after they got married, and then moved us back to Florida, back to our old house and back to our old jobs. That means my parents are going to have to work again just to make ends meet. And me? I’m going back to bagging groceries at Albertsons instead of me being assistant manager at Busskersons back in Germany!

“I was the happiest I’d ever been. For the first time in my life I had it all. A decent job, a nice house and my own family. But you didn’t want that for me, did you? No, you sneaked off to Germany, tracked me down so you could wish for all those things to be taken away. And that’s exactly what happened. And I see you’re paying the price for sneaking out of the house and leaving your parents worried sick for 5 months. Small price to pay, huh?

“So now I’m back to where I was before we moved to Germany. I actially saw myself moving on to the future instead of my constantly living in the past like you do. Such is the curse you possess, to keep people from changing and force them to stay the same for the rest of their lives. And if they do change, you alter their destinies to undo those changes and place them right back on square one. Might I suggest you find a way to get rid of this curse before it harms everyone, including you!”

Silence filled the living room after Steve’s lengthy narrative. Then all eyes fell on Ian in anticipation of his response.

“I missed you, Steve,” Ian spoke up.

“That’s it? You took away my dream life just because you missed me?” Steve yelled. “You could’ve moved on, just like I did before you intervened! You-”

Steve stopped speaking as his thoughts took over. Shaking his head at the revelation of these thoughts, he spoke in a much calmer voice, “I’m sorry, I keep forgetting. ‘Change’ is a word that doesn’t exist in your vocabulary.”

Then Steve walked out of Ian’s house and out of Ian’s life forever.