Jon's Hastily Hatched Plan for the Future

That's it. I've figured it all out. When I go to Europe in a couple of weeks, I'm just going to stay there.

I feel like I've exhausted the possibilities of Jon Bershad, Rutgers student and drama enthusiast of a generally pleasant disposition and decent nature. I need something new; a new beginning filled with choices and opportunities. So I will discard my past, change my name, and create an entirely different identity for myself.

I will be a new man! A debonair man! A mysterious man! A man younger men would be envious of and older men would try to keep their daughters away from. But they will fail. Oh, how they will fail.

I'll sell the plane ticket for my return flight and, with the money, I will buy one suit. It will be a glorious suit of clothes; one that seems both bursting from the present and echoing the past at the same time. I will wear this suit and ingratiate myself into a friendly family. I will tell them that I come from America, where I was a rich and powerful man until my evil uncle stole my inheritance and stranded me alone in Paris...or London...or Venice...or wherever.

I will give my name as Edward Worthing, or Jack Bannister, or Duke Alexander Bedswallow. When they ask me about my past, I will get a hazy, far-away look in my eyes and say it's all too painful and I can not allow myself to relive it. I will give only one hint: a name, a woman's name, that I mutter to myself while staring into the horizon. It will be a classical name. Something like, I don't know, Victoria. When they ask me who she is, I will mumble something vague about a fire and quickly divert my eyes and change the subject to wine or Rennaisance art.

I will become the toast of high society, living off the money of lonely, old, rich women who pay handsomely merely for me to appear at their gala parties. At one of these parties I will meet a woman. Maybe she'll be a duchess, maybe she'll be a princess, maybe she'll simply be an especially beautiful chamber maid. We will have a wild night of passion during which she will fall madly in love with me.

In the early hours of the morning, she will awaken to find me standing on the veranda, looking out to the sea. She will join me and ask about the large scar on my back. I will have a large scar on my back.

When she asks this, I will suddenly become very cold and, telling her that this could never be, I will rush down the stairs and out the house, walking quickly down the damp cobblestone road and out of view. She will call after me, her voice choked with sobs of despair, but I will be gone.

I will become an adventurer. Perhaps I will join the secret service and become embroiled in high stakes political intrigue. My life will be filled with action and my charming exterior will hide an interior that is half stone cold assassin and half red hot lover.

Or maybe I will be a globe-trotting explorer. I will climb snowy peaks and descend into thick, green jungles. Isolated tribes who have never seen a white man before will come to know me as their friend, and the artifacts from my explorations will be seen in museums around the world.

Eventually I will return to that first European city where my new life began. There, will be the setting of my final adventure. At the end of it I will be killed. I will die heroically of course, saving a princess, or two princesses, or five. Each of them will love me more than the last but none will love me as much as that one girl, the one from the party all those years earlier. She will be there at the end, cradling me in my last moments. She will ask me to finally reveal to her my true name and, with my last breath, I will almost eke out the name, "Jon" before I succumb to my wounds. My spilled blood will puddle around me. It will be the darkest red imaginable, dilluted only in the places where it mixes with her salty tears.

I will be succeded by a child, her child, a beautiful daughter who will know her father only as the man of legends which will be repeated, in hushed whispers, for years and years to come.

That will be my new life.



...

Sigh. I've had a lame week.