The Greatest Foe

I saw a therapist once. It was more than once. The attraction was elemental. We both kidded ourselves that there was more there than there really was. Something beyond the sating of physical desire. Maybe there was, but neither of us explored that aspect of what was on offer. We liked the thought of each other and what was on display was intoxicating. The taste of her lingers on in my memory. Her words however…

She didn’t exactly open up. We’d both been open in our own way. Had to be in order for what we had to be so dizzying and mind altering. It wasn’t her that was the drug. We made the drug between us. A frenzied, sweat-soaked concoction that, if it made it onto the streets, would be banned in an instant. No, she tried to open me up. And she was good. I hardly felt those prying fingers as she attempted to get into my mind. Responding to those fingers was already a habit. Going with anything that mouth of hers wanted, was a learned response; it always seemed to be in my best interests.

Then she had to go and ruin it all. She stepped over the line and clumsily grabbed at my mask. When I reacted, she justified her clandestine attack as a way of getting to know me, then she slipped into her professional persona and gave me the spiel about needing to talk and to share. That I couldn’t be alone forever.

She didn’t get it.

She didn’t get me.

I wasn’t like her. Never will be. I’m different. It’s not just the mask, it’s what’s underneath it. I dedicated myself to this life and there’s nothing else. In the end, she was a brief diversion. A holiday from my reality. I liked it at the time. I even browsed the local properties and countenanced a move to warmer climes. But that was just the fantasy that accompanies a holiday. The only way to truly get away, if only for one day. A change is as good as a rest. Even if it is only the illusion of change. We can all dream, just as long as we keep an eye on the traffic of life. Being hit by the juggernaut of reality when you’re napping on the job hurts. Believe me, I know all about hurt.

No one tells you about the hurt. But then, there is no apprenticeship for heroes. You either are a hero, or you are not. You learn on the job, and you learn quick, and you learn hard. You have to. In order to survive you don’t dip your toe in, you throw yourself into those freezing waters. The first time you jump on in, the shock of it throws your mind into a dark place and your body forgets how to function. You stop breathing and your heart shrinks. I’d like to say that it gets easier after that. The day it gets easy is the day you die. Easy is fools’ gold. Easy is a deal with the devil with no upside. No prospect of a fair outcome.

I sniff the corrupt stench of easy out and I provide the hard lesson. There are no shortcuts. You do or you die. And there are many ways to die. The truth of it is that most people are already dead on the inside. Shambling cadavers with one foot in the grave. They have no aim. They lower their gaze, and they shuffle along in a path well-trodden. A rut carved out by demons that only leads to one place.

If I’d known that mine was a thankless task, would I have gone ahead anyway? Now I see the size of the difference that I make? The sour knowledge that were I to stop and walk away, it would all have been for nothing in a matter of days?

Yeah, I’d go again. What else is there? I can’t give up. I can’t join the masses in their inexorable march to the gates of hell. Someone has to stand for something. Someone has to do the right thing. This cannot be it. I have to believe that there is more. Even as I feel myself shrink in the monolithic shadow of all that is wrong.

Once, I thought myself a giant amongst mere men. A goliath, standing tall and showing the way. A beacon of hope. As I get older, I feel like the little boy I never was. I see the emperor for what he is, and I point, and I call him out. My eyes shine with the righteousness of it all, but no one listens. No one even reacts. The only person who sees me is the emperor as he walks on by. He sneers at me and that sneer is an extension of his obscenity. I want to cry out. I want to make a scene, but the moment is gone and my chance to do the right thing goes with it.

Timing is everything.

I look at what I have done. The things I have achieved. The stand I made. And I wonder how different it could have been. Increasingly, I feel like I was too late to the party. I got the invite but didn’t read it properly. By the time I arrived, the party was in full flow, and I was never going to change the vibe. I was an irrelevance. A museum piece obscured by the dust of a bygone era.

Life no longer takes place in the real world. There is a drug that ended humanity over a decade ago. But people are too out of it to realise it’s already too late. Maybe that’s just as well. Probably better to walk the plank in a haze of rum and smile at the circling sharks and marvel at their smiling back at you. It’s got to hurt eventually. Gotta hope the hurt doesn’t last too long. The small mercy of a quick death to follow the lingering death of a pointless existence. Do we really value ourselves so cheaply? I still refuse to believe the evidence before my own eyes. Living isn’t worth it anymore. Life is no longer a miracle. It’s a burdensome curse.

Screens are where it’s at. They capture the essence of the soul and squash it flat. Bury it alive. Is it any wonder that people talk about some meaningless set of images going viral. A virus that there is no cure for. A soporific addiction that replaces living and cleans a person out until there’s nothing left behind those staring eyes beyond the vacancy of oblivion.

Who did this?

And why did they visit this hell upon us all?

Are we really doing this to ourselves?

I can see the end game, but it makes no sense to me. And that fills me with a dread weight that sends me into the depths of despair. This is what I’ve been up against all my life. The few, who prey on the many. Those possessed of a dark emptiness that must be filled with the lives of those around them. They are the originators of the screens. They modelled those screens on themselves. A seductive front with nothing behind it. A dark, eternal hunger. A vacuum that draws a person in and ever so slowly crushes them. I see it playing out again and again and wonder at the hypnosis at play. The masses are being fed upon and they smile a shit-kicker grin as they die a protracted death. They give themselves willingly to evil.

I have seen enough of that to last me a lifetime. I’ve felt that hungry mouth upon my soul and I know the pain it bestows.

It isn’t fair.

It goes against nature.

Our true nature.

It is the Big Lie, and it will end this world if we let it.

There was a time when I stood a chance. There was a time when the difference I made lit up the world. Everyone’s looking down now though and they no longer see me. I can’t save so many. I can’t save them all. They’re already gone, and I am so alone.

I never wanted to be alone.

Never.

Sometimes I think about looking that therapist up again, but I don’t want to encounter an empty husk where once resided a bundle of endless possibilities. It’s one thing to see strangers falling by the wayside. But she would be too close to home. I couldn’t bear the guilt and shame of losing her. Of having let her down. Not being there for her when I was needed the most.

I can’t bear the guilt and shame as it is. I am a busted flush. A walking redundancy. I bob along a river of filth, and I wonder how it is that I am keeping my head above the surface. I’m fighting against the inevitability of my end and over and over I mutter, “not like this. Please, not like this.”

I am a hero. That is all that I am. A hero in a place where there is no room for heroes. Still, I seek a hero’s death. One last charge. The blast of the whistle that sends me over the top to glory.

This is what I am reduced to. I am done. And I know better than most, that to seek death is a travesty. A hero values life. All life. A hero’s deeds are never suicidal. He does not seek death, he seeks to triumph, if only for a moment, over the fragility of mortality. To encapsulate all that is right and noble and for a wonderful moment touch the face of God.

For a while back there, I considered myself immortal. Oh, my flesh would always wither, and I would die, but my legacy was assured. I was a legend in the making. There was an arrogance in my certainty. I was ignorant in my pride, and prideful in my ignorance.

Now I find myself surrounded by a faceless enemy. And that enemy is legion. I am overwhelmed and no longer have a plan of attack. They cancelled me when I was not present, and now I am no more. Invisible in my irrelevance. I lash out and I hit nothing, but still I hurt from the encounter. Fighting a losing battle in a vacuum of meaning.

Today I did not show up. I followed the ritual of habit right up to the point where I would have donned my mask and faced the cruel disinterested world. Crashed into reality with only one intent, to make a difference.

Today, I did not see the point and in not seeing it, I got that very point. The mask slipped from my grasp and for the first time in the forever of this life, I took a look at myself. I looked myself in the mirror and something monumental happened. Sometime after this encounter, I found myself on the floor. I’d been taken out and was down for the count. I didn’t know what had hit me.

My attempts at finding my feet were made clumsy by the treachery of my body. I felt like I was shaking, but the tremors were not apparent on the surface of my body. They went beyond skin deep, and they stayed there. Shocked, I was separated from comprehension. My mind needed a reboot. I was frozen by a fear that was going nowhere.

Eventually, the knowledge of what was happening to me surfaced like so much flotsam and jetsam. My nervous system was going haywire. This I recalled, was a response to trauma. Wounds that do not heal, and instead fester and consume their host if left unattended to.

Raising my head, I ceased that movement before my eyes reached the mirror. That was when I knew. This day had been a long time coming. I’d been running from it all my life. My greatest foe wasn’t the throngs of screen zombies out beyond that front door of mine. Or maybe it was. For what I saw when I gazed down upon them was my own reflection. I was as much a part of that abandonment of life and soul as any or all of them.

Only I sold myself short well before any of them. I gave myself away cheaply. Sacrificed everything I was, and what I was destined to be, before I ever had a chance to show the world what I could do. Before I ever worked out who I was.

Casting my eyes down and away from the accusatory mirror, the mask that took my life gazed up at me. The eyes filled with the finality of a nothingness that filled me with dread. I was puking before the sensations of my fear-racked body registered in my numbed mind.

I was afraid.

I’d been afraid all my life, and I couldn’t bring myself to face my biggest fear. I had called myself hero, and yet I did not have it in me to face my original enemy. An enemy who had stalked my days from the very outset.

I had run from my very first fight and fought anything and everything in the avoidance of a fight that one day I was always going to have to face up to. I’d turned my back and closed my eyes for good measure. I’d been pretending all my life.

None of it mattered now. It was meaningless. I lay in this collapsed state and mourned the loss of my strength. The strength of bravado. An exotic anger that had never served me, only possessed me.

The mirror loomed large, and the stink of my bile shamed me all the more. The hero had fallen by his own hand. The hero was always fallen. This was his natural state. I crawled away from that gaping portal to the truth. Scuttled away like the coward I was. Closing the door and leaning back against it, I attempted to cleanse myself with tears that would not come.

Crushed, I could not bare to look upon an inch of my physical form. The state of my being pained me. I felt the urge to recede from myself. Knew it was possible. Had seen it in the eyes of the damned. Those who had drowned their true self in the darkness of themselves and given their soul over to the madness of evil.

Did I really think I could counter that? Did I ever really believe that I could bathe in the light of all that was right and become that light?

That wasn’t how it worked. The odds were always stacked against each and every one of us. Falling for the lies and deceptions of the dark was easy. The promise of easy had a pull all of its own. There was never any consideration of the consequences. Conscience is solar powered. In that darkness it shuts down and never was there a whisper of all the pain and despair that was skulking up ahead. Waiting for another blind fool. Biding it’s time before it wrapped acid coated arms around the unthinking and witless victim and held them in an ever-tightening embrace. Placing a hungry mouth over the groaning victim’s mouth and consuming their anguished screams. Wrapping itself around that mortal coil and holding it in a trap of its own making.

A trap all of our own making.

All of it.

Our darkness.

Our choices.

We make it up as we go along. Paint a version of reality and live it.

I painted my darkness white and called it light.

I never faced my fear.

I’ve never been able to look myself in the eye.

And those eyes are not my own. Never my own. They’re my father’s eyes and he will never leave me be. He stands in perpetual judgement, and he tells me over and over…

You’re not good enough!

You’ll never be good enough!

I lived my life for him, but it was never enough. I knew that from the very beginning, but still I went on.

I’m sorry, Daddy.

I’m so sorry.

Why do you still hate me so?

What did I do that was so wrong?

Now the tears come and something inside me lets go. I hope I’ve let go of the right thing. I hope that I can get up from this. But right now, it’s too early to tell. Right now, I’m broken, and I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to fix it.

I cry and I cry until the pain of my sobbing breaks through, and my tears subside. Then I feel my face moving in a way that has become alien to me. The sun burning its way through the storm clouds.

I’m smiling.

Then I’m cawing and barking through the snot. It’s a laugh of sorts. A bitter-sweet song with a one-word lyric.

Hope.

I dared to hope.

I laugh all the more and feel the light from that hope.

That’s good enough for now.

More than good enough.

Later, I will burn the mask and with it the spectre of my childhood.

I’m old now, but not too old to live.

Maybe one day, I’ll uncover the mirror and like what I see.

I hope so.