*I still have to edit this.
Part 10: The Battle
Mother! I am scared. To look in the eyes of the boy is to see nothing. I wish that he would shut them if only to spare the world of one small death. What has happened to him?
Little One, it is frightening to see the look in his eyes because intellectual beings are all capable of his fate. For killers and thieves frighten us mostly because it is within our potential to act as they do. There are small demons in everyone that secretly want to break free aspiring to achieve the power of larger demons that criminals have grown inside of their bodies. In his spirit ensued a spiritual war, as persists in the spirit of humanity itself. The altercation is between an angel and a demon, and his angel had the demon pinned down for quite some time. But because the angel was not attentive, he grew to forget that the demon was underneath him. The angel felt powerful in what he considered his victory, and when he saw another in trouble, instead of finishing his own battle, he was lured by the prospect to help another fight their own beast. And when he failed to do this, his spirit was broken. Thinking he could go back to his home and rest, perhaps to try helping again another day, he was suprised to find his own demon again, standing tall, and stronger than before.
But Mother, isn’t it admirable to help others?
Oh yes darling! In many ways it is very admirable to help those in need with many things. It is admirable to shelter the homeless, to feed the hungry, to provide for those without means to provide for themselves. But in matters of the heart and soul, everyone has the provisions they need to fight for themselves, to succeed alone. Humans can recognize, certainly, their battles, and relate to others in their own battles. Sometimes it helps to commiserate, to know that you are not the only one going through a fight. But nobody can help you fight. It would be akin to a boxing match in which another boxer gets into the ring, having two fighters against one. The battle is unfair, and a person’s individual strength is not recognized, and therefore cannot be applied in similar situations in the future when one may find themselves without a fighting partner. There is a reason humans are born with both sides. For it is the balance between severity and mercy that must be established. Though the demon never dies, we keep him at bay. Sometimes he can be good for us. If we have him under control, his energy and anger can be used productively in times of injustice. His paranoia and distrust of others can aid in our intuition, for he recognizes the power of his own in others. But the angel is of a nature which understands his usefullness, and does not kill. The demon’s disposition is that of a murderer, and if he wins the battle, the angel dies. The boy’s angel is losing, and therefore faces death. The emptiness in his eyes is a place where chaos breeds, and now he is capable of anything. For he can kill, steal, hurt, torture, cheat, and destroy anything without empathy, sympathy, guilt or regret. He cares not for others, nor for himself. To murder oneself is as bad as taking the life of another. Humans are all the same, but they do not recognize this, and are not willing to relate or care for eachother based solely on their humanity, as any species would, because of their isolation and preoccupation with their individual egos that are constructed by societal programming. The battle within is a mere microcosm of the battle without. As I told you, Little One, The Universe is also equally good and evil. And when it feels isolated, and cannot relate to life it has supported on this earth, it becomes angry. The world is in a state in which this force is angry because of all the things that humans are doing in their own little worlds that we call bodies, that make it feel abused and neglected.
Mother, how did it get to be this way?
Oh Little One, it is necessary to be in a state of weakness, and to be losing to gather the strength to win. One must trust the nature of things. Things will pan out as they must. There are times of chaos, and times of order. Regardless of what happens, even without the human race, the Universe will reset itself to its natural order. Humans think they are special, but they must not forget that are a part of nature, a part of evolution just like the other animals. As long as life on a planet exists, evolution is ongoing. Humans are still animals, Little One, and they do not understand their shortcomings. They are intelligent indeed, but are certainly not fully evolved!
Can the boy be saved, Mother? Or is it too late for him?
Anyone can be “saved” Little One. Self awareness and the balance between true desire and empty immediate pleasures are two things that can help someone see the bigger picture, the picture that we talked about in the beginning of our discussion. Actions that are primarily looked down upon in this society have a negative reputation for a reason. Lust, murder, gluttony, are things that humans partake in to quell an immediate craving. Rarely do those who engage in such actions consider their consequences, nor do they consider the others who may be hurt by the abuse of their power. Often times people are hurting themselves. If a human murders another human, there is initially a lot of regret, pain and doubt inside of the murderer. This can take an extreme psychological toll on the person and will often result in madness. Sometimes the person who does the act is able to move past emotion, does not have the strength to face what they have done, and is able to objectify or justify their actions. When a person does this, it is because they cannot trust. If a person is treated poorly enough, especially as a young child, they may not be strong enough still maintain love in their heart for other humans. They may even start to believe the negative things they are taught, and become worthless even to themselves. True desire is considering the ultimate consequences. Someone who may indulge in unhealthy food to satisfy immediate cravings does not consider, though deep inside they know, that it will cause them to gain weight. And while exercising is less appealing to them in the moment than indulging in food, they are not focused on their true aspiration, which is to lose weight, and to be a healthier person who feels good about themselves. While they think they want the food more, ultimately it is not what they want. What they truly want takes hard work to get. But as we have talked about, the treasures that result from this work are greater than any immediate pleasure one can use to satisfy a superficial craving.
While both the boy and the girl have been the victims of many who took out their anger on them, their hearts persisted longer and stronger than many who have experienced the same things. And though the girl once believed in love, she has had many recent experiences that make it harder for her to hold onto this life. For a long time she suppressed and ignored these demons of her past, and only now are they gaining strength and becoming apparent to her. She can no longer believe that people are good, in the way that she does not believe in silly things like the Easter Bunny. And one cannot help what they believe, what they see to be lack of evidence of the existence of a thing. But unlike the boy, she is still searching within herself for the ability to love. Like those who have drug problems and eating disorders, it is easier for her to be afraid when faced with the prospect of truly caring about another, or herself. Her addiction is one that is not common. The craving for her to turn around and walk away alone is very strong. But she knows that she is not the kind of person to fear even death. She knows that her troubles stem from past experiences with other humans. She is afraid of love because a long time ago someone played a game with her that is not a game for children. This person promised her many things that was never able to give her at a very high price. Since then she has subconsciously sought out her perpertraitor in many negative people. She needed to learn how to forgive, and consequently, how to love another yet maintain the strength to walk away in a situation that might ultimately cause her serious harm.
Many sleepless nights, terrors, nightmares and hallucinations, have partnered with Madness to repress her negative memories. She has ultimately been faced with a decision to live or to die. In choosing to live, she has had to stop running from what she fears the most. She must go back to places she has forgotten, to remember things she does not want to be true. Where many others fear things like monsters, darkness, abuse, she fears only exposure. She would rather disappear into the darkness than be seen under the bright light of the sun. She does not engage in the things she used to find valuable. Her friends and family are slowly fading into phantoms that appear and disintigrate at their own convenience. She wishes to remain unknown, for she believes that revealing oneself is to arm others with weapons. To her all love is hoping that a person does not use the weapon she gave them to kill her. But this is just life, Little One, and she knows this. Like all addictions, she wants only to end the pain. Her failure is no longer of drugs and eating disorders, though it once was. Her drugs are the solitude and heartlessness she has immersed herself in. Her chosen hunger is self-deprivation of human affection. Now she must make the choice to start running again, or to create the life she wants out of a past that may have seemed to leave her powerless, but ultimately gave her the strength to recognize and say no to many unjust things. The boy has suffered a similar fate, only now in his display of weakness is the girl recognizing her own power within. She wants to help him. See how she looks deploringly in his direction? He is in his own world now, and does not care for her like he once did. He can no longer see through the thick fog but she cannot help him without first helping herself.
The Human: Part 8
I do not have the power to sail out of this sad fate that has settled like a fog in which the the distant lighthouse is barely visible. But what is this incling of hope within that screams brightly like a single star on a city night that refuses to have its beauty crushed by the authority of street lamps and the scattered flourescent lights of people up late in their large metropolitan caves? It will not let me go. But the man in my nightmare that chases me says that I belong to him. The one who suffocates me at night and paralyzes me with fear, says that he is in all people, that he needs me for him only and in turn will give me the love that I have sought for so long. But the tiny star says no, for he is the city lights that prevent me from seeing the natural beauty of life. The tiny star informs me that while his lights may be strong and gorgeous and abundant in their romantic and transitory existence, the light bulbs will quickly burn out. It says that it may be little because it is far away, but I should know how big and brilliant it’s nature is and I should trust that I know it is far more powerful than the street lights that seem bigger simply because I am right next to them. The tiny speck of luminescence tells me to love it. Still, I fear this battle is too hard. And still, I want to walk into the sea and forget about the the man, and the little star that begs me like a child who is feeling ignored. In my childhood, I dreamed, always, of an unreachable castle in the sky. Even with the help of the magical trampoline in my imagination I was never able to jump high enough. But the star, the little star says that it is the castle, and I must find a way to be closer to it than I am to the city lights. How do I get there, if even in my dreams my power fails me? Oh to want impossible things! The longer I stare at my feet under the water the more I am certain they are evolving into fins!
Though it worries me greatly that the boy’s shadow is growing stronger than he, and his once benign smile appears to have grown fangs that cage the angel that once breathed freely from his soul. I have collapsed and my body trembles as though my spirit is a snail and I am trying to move out in search of a new shell. This shell is my brain that has been formed by a malicious past, a precious jewel that has been carved from it’s natural state by demons to reveal the secret malady of existence. I must separate myself from it! And the boy, he is trapped as I was. Oh how awful, how evil and empty he appears, for there is not much difference now between him and the man in my terrible dreams! Is it true that I am just as ugly as he? And where is the exit to this suffering? A thousand times I have seen a door scrawled with great promises of what lies behind it, only to open it and find an empty room with a thousand more doors that lead to more empty rooms! Must I continue to believe what my experience in life so denies? I am here in this vacant building, tired of opening door after door, faced only with pieces of memories that paint slanderous words upon this shell of mine, draw ludicrous pictures, piercing the exterior that they may extract my quivering soul!
The little girl who follows me screams for the mother that I cannot be. And I have told her many times, I wasn’t there when it happened! I cannot console you! And she stares; a tiny cherub trapped behind cruel eyes so black they convey only backwards whispers, too encrypted, too subtle to decipher. It doesn’t matter, she says, that I was not there. All you have to do is believe in me. But I cannot! I cannot! And how is it that I believe the man more than the child? How is it that I trust the man who terrifies me, who suffocates me, who plagues my subconscious, who has killed all prospect of sleep and contentment? He has been so familiar to me in my life that I have succumbed to accept him. For he is all I know of love. The child now; unfamiliar, mysterious, with eyes like tombs. And I watch the man take the hand of the child, she looks back at me with the expression and understanding of an old woman. For she has danced with evil, played with the Devil and bejeweled her soul with promises like bullets that stick in the heart. Oh God, can it be that I am her? And if this is so is it possible to deny the self? I am afraid of what I know. Must I accept that this is life, that sometimes an animal prays upon their young? Must I accept that I was old before I had the chance to grow? For I know that I know the man and his games. And I know that his games have defeated me, for I have been playing them and losing long after he was gone. Door after door, after open door, I am constantly playing the game. I should look up to see the skylights that shall set me free. I should try to fly to that little star, to exist in my castle in the sky! And I shall not be afraid of the darkness that lies in the heart of the little girl, it will be there forever, but it does not color her soul black, instead it highlights her spirit, brings out the moon in her eyes! For most encounters with spirits happen in the night. I shall bring her to the castle with me! But as I dream here I feel regret and guilt as it would seem to be my fault that the boy has been thrown back into a lake of emptiness and despair. If I had just believed him it would have portrayed him a hero in his mind, a friend if anything, and that is all he wanted. Oh what have I done to him?! Now he is as I was, and I know the power of such place, for it is a wickedness that acts rapidly as a flesh eating virus, but instead it feasts upon the heart and soul. But he has travelled deeper into the abyss than I have. And I fear the pressure at the bottom is too strong for him to return to the surface. But I must help him. I must!
The Passerby: Part 5
Once a statue, immovable as the earth from its orbit, erupting cold words and covered in the feces from birds of negativity, her light, though small, is glowing so brightly that it should murder what I am, an entity of formed only of darkness. What is this shapeshifter who can so present herself as the sad victim of gorgons, now appearing to me as some kind of weightless angel fashioned from a salty breeze that cleanses the skin and alleviates a person from the sweltering burning of hell? She is a charlaton, a fakir! I wonder where she keeps her chest of costumes, probably buried behind those impeccably masked eyes, as if she had decorated them with the stolen halos of murdered angels! You cannot fool me, temptress! Like the ass I once was, had given you only dirt, so delusionally I had believed I was giving you a treasure, so now you believe you can give me what I need? Well I need nothing, never had anything to begin with but my vacuum that was filled with the waste of others! Go ahead, as you step nearer, recite your words of poetry, sing your siren song, give to me the precious troves that you’ve stolen from God! I will twist your words, strangle you like this serpentine death has strangled me, to stop the screeching of your heavenly voice, and I will piss on the gifts you will present to me. Leave me, angel of lies! What makes you think you can throw away all I have given you, and expect me to so graciously accept your offerings? You cannot simply know nor understand the silence in my being that has existed since I was a young boy. You cannot simply understand the abandonment, the pressure, the echoes of hate that still flow like waves of torture over this sick machine called a brain! It is true that you once had me to protect you, but in your overzealous independence, your ill will and bizarre fantasies I could not bother to free an animal that prefers to be caged. It is true that you are the only one who can hear that little boy crying in the night. But I am on my way to smother him in his sleep, for his crying once sad is irritating my nerves, and I care no longer to find out the reasons he cries.
*
He cries because he has been abandoned! He cries for the same reasons the little girl cannot cry!
*
Oh it is you now, you are here. For what purpose? To give me dirt? To play the part I played for you?
*
I am here because I see you. I am here because I understand now that I am writing this story! But I cannot write the ending without you. I have come to ask for your help in making the story of life a victorious struggle, rather than a futile one!
*
Victory? There is no victory. The world, it ends with a whimper, not a bang!
*
Oh you and your library of poetic references! Perhaps you should stop stealing the insights and pretending to understand the struggles of others and fight your own war for once! And besides, that is the fate only of hollow men!
*
And what is any man but hollow? The body is nothing but a cage that houses the organ, the brain is but a computer that imprisons consciousness. And we think our sentience makes us “human,” whilst those around us abuse us, lie to us, cheat us, and steal from us, who would still call themselves noble men, not animals? This hope, this victory you speak of is the stuff of madmen who cannot stand the pain of existence, so they fabricate gods and exist in dreams and when these things fail them they live in bottles to feel anything at all! I don’t want to feel things. The consistant calm of lack of sentiment is far more acceptable than the chaos of conflicting emotions.
*
It was not long ago you were me and I was you! What has happened? How have we become eachother so quickly?
*
How is a murderer not a murderer only seconds before his first kill? That is how. Tell me, oh enlightened one, how is that you have grown wings so swiftly? You must have torn them from an injured bird and tied them on with seaweed! Imposter!
*
No! I had seen you there and recognized the look upon your face, contorted by a power so fierce! Your eyes that I once remembered as being only the kindest and most beautiful disguise are now evil springs! Like gashes they spout the blood of the angel you once had on your side! That look, it made me feel the way the man makes me feel, like I should let go, as if nothing at all is better than this almost nothing, this cold draft in a vacant room with no windows and a thousand doors that lead me back to the same place! I feel nothing yet I am something. I want nothing yet my body needs. And I have racked my mind attempting to figure out if I should keep on! I have played your current role for so long now and yet I could not see myself. That is why you came to me to stop me. You saw yourself in me. But it frightened you so that when you went back to your solitude you found yourself weak, and questioning, for you gave what little faith you had for yourself to me! And I could have used it, blindly, but how could I have truly? To give me faith in such a ignoble and unworthy state is to give a child a loaded gun! One does not just believe the intricate tales and dangers of an intrepid traveler. Those who want stories, they sit and they listen but others, like us, need to see, need to go, need to learn how to survive so that we can start to live! Others don’t go there, to these places, because they are afraid! People like us; we were born in a mysterious jungle. Instead of becoming prey to the monsters we must fashion weapons, discover plants that will aid our healing, build fortresses and -
*
Oh don’t you see? Don’t you hear yourself talking? Delusions, fantasies! Lies, it’s all you can speak! Fairytales, poppycock, boulderdash! There is nothing here but what you have created with your own madness! You ought to be locked up, chained even, if only to match the mental chains that your ignorant myths wrap around your existence!
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