The following story is about somebody we all probably know and the end of this tale is how we would all want it to be.

He begins the blame game by failing in school. He tells his parents he’s bored and the bad teachers are the reason he doesn’t have passing grades. “It’s not my fault,” he tells them. Mommy and Daddy feel sorry for their little darlin’ and send him to a different school, but he complains about the teachers there, too. He manages to graduate with a D average.

He’s now 18 and gets a job in a grocery store and when told by his boss he needs to pick up the pace while he stocks the shelves, he tells off the boss and gets fired. “It’s not my fault,” he says to his parents. “I was working fast enough. The boss is a jerk.”

He’s 23 now and still living at home. He talks his parents into giving him money to buy a new car. Three weeks later, he pulls out in front of a pickup truck and gets T-boned. Luckily, he’s fine after the accident, but his car is totaled. When he’s given the summons, he tells the police officer, “It wasn’t my fault. The guy should have seen me pull out. He had plenty of time to stop.”

Now he’s 25 and he gets his girlfriend pregnant. “This is definitely not my fault,” he says to his parents. “She told me she was on the pill.”

His parents convince the girl, who’s living with her grandmother, to have the baby, but the girl is a drug addict and is sent to rehab so she can’t take care of little Amanda. With no job and an unwilling grandmother to be the baby’s caregiver, he hands Amanda over to his parents.

He gets bored at home and starts to hang out with his old girlfriend’s drug crowd. One day he’s caught with two bags of meth and is arrested. He makes up a lie and tells the judge that he was forced at gunpoint to deliver the drugs to a dealer. The judge puts him on probation for his first offense.

Six months later, after getting fired from a second job, the police raid an apartment and arrest him and six other people with possession of heroin. He gets booked again and spends three months in jail.

He does his time and moves into an apartment above his sister’s house. He has parties all through the night with loud music and loud guests. His sister tells him to stop all the late night noise. “It’s your fault about the noise,” he says to her. “Why did you buy a crummy old house with crummy old floors and ceilings?” They argue. She throws him out.

He returns to his parents. When they ask why he doesn’t come around to see his daughter, he replies, “You think it’s my fault? I got somebody looking for me and if he finds me, I’m in big trouble. But I need a place to crash so I’ll set up something in the basement and if he comes looking for me here, I can jump out the back door and run off into the woods.” His parents tell him no. They don’t want his trouble in their house, especially with little Amanda there.

Now homeless and moneyless, he sits on the city sidewalk with his back against a wall. People come by. Some throw a coin or two into an empty tomato sauce can he found in the park where he sneaks at night to sleep.

One day, an old man with a long white beard walks by and tosses a piece of paper into the can. “Thanks a lot,” he shouts at the passing man. He pulls out the piece of paper and reads.

“It is your fault. All of it,” it says. He crumples the paper and throws it into the air where a gust of wind lifts it up until it disappears.

The next morning, he returns to his spot by the wall. Sitting next to him is a man in a blue jacket that looks exactly like the one he wears. The man has his head drooped down between his knees so he can’t see his face. That’s weird, he thinks. This man has the exact same kind of tomato sauce can in front of him, too. “Hey dude, where did you find that can?” he asks the man. The man lifts his head and for a moment they stare at each other. He gasps and pulls back. He’s not looking at the face of a strange man. He’s looking at himself! “It is all my fault,” says the man. “All of it. So, I gotta do what I gotta do.”

As he looks away and then looks back, suddenly, the man is gone. For five straight nights, he sees himself as that man come in a dream and he says the same words every time. “It is my fault. All of it. So, I gotta do what I gotta do.”

And so, he did. He found the last teacher who had given him an F grade, who then helped him get a job with his brother’s construction company. Then he found his boss that he had told off in the grocery store. After that he found the guy who was looking for him. He paid his debt from the money he had made from his new job. Next, he made peace with his sister before he went home to his parents and promised to be a father to his little Amanda.

To every single one of them, he said the same exact words.

“It is my fault. All of it,” and with that, he felt free for the first time in his life.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.