Contrary

“I’ve not had enough! You’ve not had your fun yet! You absolutely must keep me imprisoned here!”

I laugh and that laughter is joyful and it is merry.

Even my laughter?

No!

It is not my laughter. Inside I am wailing and gnashing my teeth and crying out for a release from this hell, but increasingly I feel those words that are not my own, the very opposite of my own, exerting an awful power over me. Those words are changing me and I don’t know whether I can stop that. 

Words are my prison and I don’t know how much more I can take.

“Leave me to it!”

I shake with barely supressed rage as my thought is twisted into the opposite of what I intended. My originating thought was help!

Before this I had formed the words enough! You’ve had your fun! Let me go!

I think they are listening. I can hear them moving around out there. Sometimes I hear screams and I imagine that there are others out there who, like me, are trapped and being tortured like this.

I am beginning to think that this is hell. I’m beginning to allow myself to consider this as a very real possibility even though it threatens to undo me completely. Perhaps this is purgatory and I still have a chance. A chance of what, I do not know, but I cling to that hope nonetheless, that I can get out of here. That I can escape this and return to the life that I know.

I do not understand the point there is in what I am being subjected to. I don’t get the lesson that I am supposed to learn. If I am being re-educated, then how will I graduate from this hellish school?

I slump down on the stone floor. The stone is warm and glows with a dull red light that fills me with dread. Despite hearing their movements and those occasional, despairing screams, I have seen no one. I have not eaten. I have not even drunk. I have not slept. Yet I have been here for an age.

One thing I do know, is why I am here. I have always known the why of it. That is buried deep within me and it has been a part of who I am for so very long.

I lied.

I lied because I was lied to. 

One lie spawned another and so it went, until I was drowning in the lies and the truth wasn’t even a memory anymore.

Now that is also a lie.

That lesson I have learned.

“Ignore me! I haven’t learned this!”

I stifle a sob. How will I make them listen? How will I tell them that I understand?

In order to lie, I had to have a counterpoint to my lies. I had to know what the truth was in order to subvert it. I referenced the truth constantly and I rejected it again and again with each and every lie.

I convinced myself that it wasn’t like this. 

How?

I told myself that the truth was a lie and I painted the world and all the people in it as liars. 

I’m beginning to think that what I did was to make myself into some terrible, wolf in sheep’s clothing. I hid in plain sight and with my lies, I transformed everyone around me into my prey. 

Sometimes, I even made them like me. I filled them so full of lies they were no longer themselves.

Those screams. They sometimes sound familiar somehow, like I know those people. But that cannot be. I’ve never known anyone, not in the life that brought me to this place I didn’t.

If everything I say is inverted and made the opposite, what am I to do?

I tried silence, but that silence began to press in on me and the force of it built and built and built until I thought my head was going to break apart. Left in that silence with only my thoughts was another form of hell and I’ve seen enough of hell and felt enough of its pain to last me a lifetime and more.

I keep trying to get my head around this puzzle.

What I say is the opposite of what I meant to say. 

I tried to apply myself to the conundrum of my imprisonment as though it were a new board game or app. All that was needed was that I think the opposite words and then say what is needed and I win. I win and my prize is my freedom and I get to go back.

Simple really.

But that did not work. 

I did not work.

There are other rules and I am yet to identify them, let alone understand them.

I think there is something of meaning and of truth to all of this. What I say has to matter. In which case, I have a lot to learn and before I can learn, I have to unpick all of that which I did in the stead of truth. I have to break through the thick walls of deceit and denial so that I have a chance of seeing clearly what it is that I must do.

Fear held me in an awful paralysis. I played at trying and I kidded myself that I struggled when all I did was curl up in a ball and do nothing. 

One thing I know is that when it comes to fear and pain and anger, doing nothing is not a good option. Doing nothing is also a lie because you are doing something and that something adds to the fear and causes more pain and builds up the anger. 

This place is alive in a way that I cannot explain. It responds to me. I think it is what makes my words into the opposite of what I intended. For a while, it left me be with my endeavours and then ever so slowly, it turned a dial up so that the change around me crept up on me in a way that could not be ignored by the time I noticed it.

This time it was another form of fear that pressed in upon me. Fear that made my own fear seem paltry and pathetic in comparison. I was being reminded that however bad I thought things were, they could get a whole lot worse. I was also being reminded that my games were amateur and my lies flimsy in comparison to what awaited me should I fail this challenge that has been set for me and me alone.

Alone.

The power in this place is overwhelming.

I think I am supposed to acknowledge why it is that I put myself in this place and accept that what I did in order to arrive here was wrong. I am expected to turn things around. 

I did the opposite of what I should have done.

For so long, I focused on the semantics of the opposite words that had come from my mouth. For so long, I looked at those words and tried to work out what words I could think up to produce the words that would unlock this cell of mine and set me free and allow me to return to the world I knew.

I tried to manipulate hell, just the same as I tried to manipulate the world. My lies and manipulation helped me create a hell on Earth and here I am attempting to replicate that in hell itself.

How am I to free myself of this place if I cannot think my way out?

It took me far too long to realise what it was that I needed to do.

Is it too late?

That was always the gauntlet I ran as I kept going with lie after lie and lost myself in those lies.

I know what I need to do, and now I know, and I feel a change occurring within me.

I feel…

Sorry.

Better.

Resigned.

Sorry for everything that I have done. All of the lies. I see now what it was that I did back there in the world, ripple after ripple of hurt. The consequences of my actions were more terrible than I would ever know. I sensed this at the time, but I kept going regardless. 

I feel better because I don’t have to be like that anymore. That was one of the lies that I told myself over and over, that I couldn’t help it, that it wasn’t my fault. I avoided even looking at the truth of it. I wouldn’t see how things really were. If I wasn’t to blame, then who was? I blamed everyone else. I blamed the world for everything that I did. I told myself that it wasn’t fair, like a raging child, and that was the only justification for what I did. I wanted to get my own back. I wanted to even the score when all it was, was a race to the bottom.

And now I am resigned to the end of that race to the bottom. I am here where I was always headed. I am here where I belong.

I lied and I cheated and I harmed people in the worst of ways. I lied to them, even as I hurt them. I kept them in a constant state of confusion so I could do to them what I had done to me. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Only they never woke up to the revenge I exacted upon them. They never knew the truth of it. 

I did though. I saw it all and I knew what I was doing. I had to. I was after all controlling them and I controlled them every step of the way.

At least now I know what it means, and that is what counts. That is what always counted. Meaning. Words have to have meaning. Life has to have meaning. 

Nothing ever mattered to me. Nothing ever meant anything to me, so I sucked the meaning and the life out of the people around me. I took. I stole. I was a parasite, and yet for all of my taking from the world around me, I was never satisfied. I was empty. A void.

I was a vacuum that sucked in pain and anger and that only made me worse and worse, hungrier for more. A hunger that was never sated. I was never going to stop. Could I have stopped? I never gave myself the chance to think that one through, let alone try it.

It should have mattered.

I should have mattered.

I should have meant something.

I should have cared.

“I know.”

I whisper those two words and they fall from my mouth unchanged. My mouth turns up into a smile that greets the tears rolling down my face. 

Those two words mean something. They mean everything. I am glad that I have had this time and that I have been afforded this moment. I understand what is important now and the reign of lies is over. 

I am free.

The truth will always set you free.