It Had to Be

You’d think I would know better. Really. It was a simple thing: just be normal, like everyone else. Enter a crowded room and not wonder about everything.

Oh, how I would try! Let’s see. Work hard at not working hard! Absurd enough? Absurdism had nothing on me. Master of Dissembling that I was! Or am, whatever!

You wonder if there will ever be enough of me to go around. There wasn’t enough of me for myself. What a thought. Where was me for myself? Going gone done! Sold to the gentleman who had better things to do than think about these things!

But this is such pedantic, miserabilist, existential foolishness. Just live, my friends would say! Live!

Do people with broken legs run? Do we expect bedridden tuberculosis patients to dance? Yet no one could see what made me me. My hidden self, so empty yet full of possibilities. How quaint, the skewered rabbit runs at the stake, pierced through and through, his heart beating quick.

#

She had no time for me. It was those missing opportunities, the slight inflection of her voice that never registered, that I could not see. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Overcompensate. There’s a word. The car salesman was desperate for a sale, the interest rate reduction wasn’t cutting it, and the free clear coat was worthless. So, he bumps it up a notch, oblivious to the pained expression, the I-want-to-be-polite on the customer’s face.

“You can’t try again tomorrow,” her eyes said as she turned to go. Always a faint string of hope to cling to. Keep not trying. A thousand times the same. What for her is a passing moment is the end of everything, the cliff so suddenly near. Tumbling, tumbling down the rabbit hole that never ends, to yet another shiny realization.

But really in the grand scheme of things it's all zero anyway. Did you know that the mathematical idea of nothing had to be invented? We started off with numbers and then later stumbled upon what shouldn’t be possible to be expressed. Zero, now there is nothing to talk about! Don’t you see how absurd that is?

Oh, c’mon give it a moment will ya? So full of life you never had to deal. With nothing. Living off everything, hardly guessing what is so obvious to me. So what? You say.

What indeed.

#

Oh, I should cut you some slack. You never lived my life. How could you possibly know what I have known? Go ahead, live a lot.

Then, the search begins for what everyone else despises. I didn’t know at the time. But I know it now. We have nothing in common.

Hell. Now, there’s a word no one uses.

#

There’s too much to say! The words can’t carry the weight! How do you say what cannot be said? The suicide note is wanting, not nearly good enough? I know a darkness that is inexpressible. It’s beautiful and familiar, my only friend.

Why keep on searching? That faint scratch, from the outside in, life poking through the shell of my imagining. I could not help myself; this was the only way. Ignore it, and let the darkness be me forever?

That choice. Between what will be and what could be. One so easy, dark and natural, so sure. The other tentative, fleeting, wonderingly pure!

You say, be true to yourself! You hardly know what you are asking. Truth for me, my black beauty could never be pure!

Hell again, I say to you. That choice made a thousand times.

#

We’re done, finally. It’s from outside because there’s nothing within. So, plot a life from everything outside. So easy to say, so hard to do. Living inside out and outside in. Try it, you won’t like it.

That’s why no one wants to be told anything! Our minds are made up. We prefer the familiar to anything else. Small consolation to me, fighting a life and death battle every day!

But isn’t that the way? Why the distant past controls us every day, from the indiscretion of ancestors who thought every action was their own only, never imagining that what they did or didn’t do would deal with us. Harshly or not, it hardly matters if you abide by what’s within only.

The monster is me! And everything else that I only choose without help from outside. See, it's not hard to make such a foundation of what is obvious. From that first murderous thought to the last, it's not a Star Wars moment, you know!

We are fascinated with evil everywhere.

#

Oh, this tenuous moment, this hardly realized truth, for those who have reached the end of themselves only! All others shy away, their disgust palpable to themselves only because we few know what cannot be adequately expressed and will never be completely understood.

You think that in amongst these mundane lives shines only the latest gimmick. The latest undoing to be scoffed at and undermined? How little you know of what is infinite, what cannot be defined! It is sorrow.

Sorrow unto life, the monster quelled. His tears are not mine; they are his only. For what he has, he can keep forever. It is not mine to give what I no longer have.

It is suffering that leads the way. The only part of life that deals with nothing but is not nothing. It is life itself.

#

You never knew that most kits perish? Three litters a year of cute little bunnies gone forever. Carnivores would not be excused were it not for their need.

But we all know that mothers smile after the worst pain of their lives! That backside injection is never good enough. Half frozen, half alive to what is a gift from outside. You know it can’t be real without what hurts! Such simple truth blotted by those who never see.

Long ago, one single man, who no one ever talks about, suffered and died for all the monsters in the world. What appreciation we showed, killing him. It had to be.