I feel something weighing heavily on my heart. Not a tumor, nor a lodged bullet. I haven’t even been stabbed, and yet it hurts terribly. It squeezes my heart, grips it, presses it, tears at it, kisses it, toys with it, and then lets it go. It comes at irregular intervals. They say the heart never truly hurts… well, mine does. This is no imagined ache, no dreamt-up affliction – it is pain as real as a hand digging into flesh. It does not spread throughout my body. It does not race along my nerves. It does not even warn me of its arrival. It simply emerges out of nowhere, suddenly, like the muggers and murderers who are said to leap from the pitch-black depths of alleyways (though I do not know why people – or why I – imagine them as creatures born of darkness; perhaps it is the influence of films and the tired clichés of novels, forever pairing good with light and evil with shadow. They can attack you just as easily in broad daylight, anywhere, at any time). It surges forth all at once, as though intent on suffocating the truest part of who I am.
Could I be in love? With whom? Perhaps with unfulfilled dreams and desires. Am I a monster? Yes. Perhaps outwardly as well, but inwardly most certainly. I am not imagined, merely a simple-minded, naïve reality. Nothing more. A human being with a head upon his neck, a torso beneath it, two arms and two legs, with troublesome fingers and toes dangling from them. A sagging spine, a feeble arm, an insignificant presence. This would be me, if I were like this. Who am I trying to fool? This is what I am. A person unworthy of love and incapable of receiving it, but not an insane madman.
Was I loved? I do not think so. Did I love? I doubt it.
To the west lies the place I am disgusted by. To the east, the one I fear. To the north, the one I do not want to see. And to the south, the one I do not want to hear about.
Disgust is an interesting thing. On this God-given earth, one can be disgusted by anything. Is that reprehensible? No. It is the individual’s rightful prerogative. Gagging, a restrained grimace, or the stiffness settling over one’s face – all of these are merely expressions of opinion. Nothing more, nothing less. Is there such a thing as a bad opinion? No. There are only opinions with which we disagree. I disagree with myself. That can indeed be irritating. Self-contradiction.
This is what I fear. Fears must be faced. Overcome, dispelled, destroyed, defeated. Fear is the greatest enemy, but if that enemy is myself… I look into the mirror. It is no illusion; I cannot deceive myself. And I cannot set myself against my own existence.
This is what I do not want to see. The past and the future, the inevitable ending. The problem is not this duality, but what makes them what they are: the present. More precisely, what we live through. The smells, the tastes, and those heavy, wretched sentences that kill us. A word is just as murderous a tool as a knife or a pistol, and yet we are not afraid to use it. We do not even think it through. We just speak.
This is what I do not want to hear. The foolishness, the senselessness, all that goes unexamined, the idiocy. We have learned to utter words, but that does not mean we have learned to speak, because speaking is far more than that.
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