Aurorae

It takes a special kind of tune to stick with you, even as you descend into the seething blackness of your own mind, to give you strength as you look in the mirror each morning and beg for… something. What it is, I don’t know. Nothing about it makes any sense, yet it visits on me at times that I have this pit, this yawning, gaping hole somewhere in my psyche that hardly anyone knows about. And why should they? I never open easily to people, and when I do, it’s calculated. Not out of a want to manipulate, you understand, I just can’t have every semi-personal conversation I have devolve into my fantasies of catching stray bullets, of being run over by uncaring drivers, of simply ceasing to be. So I give them just a little bit, am genuine until a certain point. After that point, no one wants to be near it. Oh, they don’t know it, but they don’t. No matter how much they claim they want to be.

Like I said, it takes a special kind of someone to stand knee-deep in your filth with you. And the others? Well I’m not sure they want to know, or need to know. Probably better that way.

Stay away from this kid, he’s pretty fucked in the head.

Let me try to describe what it feels like.

It’s like walking in sunshine for just a second, before something slithers out of the morass that suddenly opens in front of your feet,  and drags you down past all sense of logic or rationale, past loving, past caring, past anger, past sadness, past emotion, past everything you once knew and loved, and all you can do is ride it out and pray that the eventual grey that settles parts to let the sun in again. Friends, loved ones, even those most dear become nothing more than cardboard cutouts, veiled, nothing visible save features rustling under grey cloth, bones barely visible under a shroud. Northern lights over a graveyard.

The transience of these feelings does nothing to relieve the vice grasping my mind as I’m dragged down, down, down; the promise of an end, as inevitable as the onset, does nothing. Nothing does anything.

The fuck am I even saying?

It seeps into everything. Into the way you talk to people, the way you act around them, the things you start prioritizing, the way you conduct your day. The things you value end up owning you, and when you value the sanity of others far more than you do your own, you become a slave to others, devoted to sparing them of the agony you feel. I no longer know where the line between sacrifice and self-flagellation is, and I’m afraid I’ve gone past the point of caring. Who really cares if something happens to me, anyway?

Okay not strictly true, I know many people would be devastated if I was to go. Not arrogance, just simple facts. And I’m not dramatic enough to pretend that my life is all that difficult, or that I’m somehow placed in the midst of insurmountable circumstances. I’m not. Life is alright, and it goes on. I somehow find the strength to keep going, even if living feels more like a habit formed over the years than an act in and of itself. But therein lies the seductive, deadly appeal of this corrupted form of mental martyrdom; I enjoy it. It’s the same feeling that drives me to stay up till obscene hours late at night, probing the darkest corners of my mind for judgement material. Why bother with reality TV when you’ve got a character you know more intimately than anything else, whose flaws are glaring, and who has no capacity to fight back?

Cruelty and pain are two sides of the same coin. Funny, how those who would never inflict it on others are so quick to turn the full weight of their malice upon themselves. I am a hateful, hateful man.

My Lord Redeemer, I shall deny you entry into my mind.