5.Nov.08

The Voice of Reason

 By: Varyn

In the end, so much is seen through pity.

True to that nature so weak in will, you pity yourself. The way you have been twisted, severed. Or maybe it was really self-inflicted, your own fault for not being able to meet the challenges that you believed fate had rammed you under. You don’t know, exactly, but really all you have ever known is that you blame yourself, victim or otherwise, and you hate it.

You hate it almost as much as you hate that overwhelming sense of pity…Shame at the loss of what you never had but always thought you could, should, or would have, going by what you were told. But maybe they, those most insistent outsiders, were the idiots that drove you here with their nudging questions, empty words, promises from faceless lips-- all towards an exaggeration of the mediocrity that lies within you, an extrapolation of your own self-inflating show. Why, then, do you pity them most of all? Because they were fool enough to believe in you?

You know, now, that the only thing more humiliating than being thought badly of is being thought well of. There is no greater torture than not being able to meet the standards that you have set for yourself, especially when you have grown convinced you can hear them echoed around you by a wayside audience that is ever more expectation than admiration.

One slip, and you will have lost it. You feel this like a cold pressure nagging the back of your neck, followed forever by a sneaking suspicion: Maybe the loss has already begun.

You tried to slip beneath the radar, you didn’t want them to know…To know that you were different, somehow, not quite right no matter how hard you tried to compensate for yourself. It must have showed, too. No matter how much you punished yourself, you never said the right thing at the right time. You never did what was best. You were just wrong somehow and they must have seen it all; seen it in the way you moved, the way you spoke. Neither were as they should have been and you failed to make them so.

Certainly, people were often too kind--or too conscious of the pressure to be so—for they did not shun you directly. No, they put up with you. They even humored you, telling you that you were fun, or clever, or something. It didn’t help; you were burned by the edge of strain in their voices as it hastened on the heels of your every departure.

And so to depart entirely became your wish; lord knows how you tried to escape the reality of your own awkward misfit nature…Falling into escape as though it could fix you. It couldn’t, but nevertheless you grew to love whatever you could pump into your veins to lessen your sense of self. You still looked the fool, only now you were not so aware of it-- But even that was not enough.

Reality kept chasing you for running away, building lies within the lies, an escape from the need to escape. It only made you weaker. You trembled like a hunted thing fleeing from what little shadow you could cast, increasingly helpless to resist yourself. And always the screams got louder, so that in those rare moments of coherency you heard the truth like never before: none could help but see you, see through to the shivering smallness that was your anchor, the center of your mind's every move.

And so it should be, you reasoned; the disgust others must have felt when thus confronted was but an echo of what you yourself had always known, and yet somehow it still made you realize so many latent things…And now you’re certain: You just want to be alone.

That’s what led you here, really. You and I --stuck together-- lunacy and its critic. We are alone now, or soon shall be, the method and its madness self-defeated.

With a twitch of truth, a slip of fate, once again you pull the trigger on me-- shaking slightly as the tension between your teeth explodes like a shocked thing that rings, so briefly, in our ears...

Only then, together in that moment, can we control the silence we become.