A Tale of One Bet

This is probably going to be the most cryptic of my posts so far, and coming from someone who calls himself Unmaskd, that’s saying a lot. But I want to capture and share the feelings of this moment, and for better or for worse, this blog has become my best outlet for this part of my consciousness.

Exactly 365 days from now a bet will come to fruition. It’s a strange bet, made over twenty years ago between two best friends. One friend has likely forgotten it by now. The second friend has never let it go, for it has been very dear to his heart. Despite that, throughout the years he has barely acted on winning it. Instead, he’s been alternating between powerful efforts with impressive results, half-ass attempts and long stretches of well-camouflaged procrastination.

Getting closer and closer to the date that he’d set himself back in his childhood, he realized that unless he does something drastic about it, he going to fall flat on his not so childish face. And so, in the last attempt to win that bet, he made another one — this time with himself. That other bet was simple, pretty much black and white, with no room left for self-deception.

And then strange things started happening. Things that typically happen in lousy written Hallmark channel made-for-TV movies. All of a sudden, his past started coming alive, mixing with his present and shaping his future. People he had not seen in years started popping up unexpectedly in his life, reminding him about his old successes and stirring memories of his decades old aspirations. His friends started reminding him about his ambitions — without having a slightest idea what he had been driving himself through. And goals he almost had given up on started to look real.

And on top everything else, the idea of his own mortality — something he had been always well aware of — suddenly sunk in, bringing in sadness, but also filling every moment of his life with meaning and clarity. Life remained the same on the surface, and yet had changed completely.

And all the masks he had been wearing started merging into one…