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YOU ARE YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY.
LIFE IS NOT FICTION and when you cast yourself as the main character in
the tragedy of your life, it reduces your best and truest emotions to hollow
lines spoken on a reductionist stage.
LOSING YOURSELF IN DRAMA is a sure path to unhappiness. Resolve your contradictions,
embrace your inadequacies, and do not inflict your fictional self upon others.
ONCE I KNEW MORE THAN I KNOW NOW, but that has been lost. Once I could define
the world by the look in a dog's eyes, but I've left that behind. I let
go of the fictitious self I had created in favor of the true self; it was
not the best of trades, for in every measure my fictitious self was more
colorful, more exciting, more dangerous than I am now.
BUT THAT OTHER SELF WAS DOOMED. Doomed to sorrow, doomed to pain, doomed
to inflict the hurt on others that it could not abide within itself. That
other self was perhaps more alive than I'll ever be; but it was more dead
than I will ever know. It was a body without a soul, beautiful in its precision
but merciless in its lack of compassion.
STILL I MISS IT and all that it was. It took chances I would not take, went
where I would not go. It found things I never knew existed. The life I live
today is composed of things that other self found, out there in the darkness,
and brought back to this world. I killed it and took what it had gathered.
WHEN FACED WITH CRISIS now I can still feel that murdered self, whispering
to me what it thinks I should do. It is always wrong. Its advice is the
advice of emperors and murderers, authoritarian and hungry with desire--desire
for control, for the infliction of pain, for the supremacy of self above
all. Dead though it is, it lies restless and foams at the mouth, a rabid
corpse.
I WILL NOT BE A PREDATOR. Nor will I be prey.
TO BE ONE'S OWN KILLER is a form of release. Death brings change, change
brings transcendence, transcendence brings peace. I was alive then; I am
alive now. The two are not the same, but it is the latter I have chosen.
I DID NOT CRY WHEN I DIED.
When I think of the time when I
was more alive than alive,
I remember crazed nights and endless days.
I remember words repeated endlessly in a journal.
I remember questions asked endlessly in the dark.
I remember speaking in a voice that was not my own.
I remember never calling home.
A year and more lost to a sickness of need.
A need to hurt, a need to feed.
A need to embrace my every breath.
A need to love the face of death.
When you've been gone that long,
when you ignore the line twixt right and wrong,
you come back and you miss it.
You glimpse it and you want to kiss it.
You make love to your mind. You relish never being kind.
When you think it's over once and for all, you still wait for it to call.
You live tensing for the fall.
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