2003-05-27 - 2:16 p.m.
"you have such a hard time being human, don't you?"
jasmine and i recently had a conversation that ended in that question.
we were talking about being depressed and being terrified that i will end up a bitter, ugly, old person incapable of loving anyone or anything because of the awful risks involved in love. it's incredible; all the theoretical intricacies and options i had tried to discern about suffering and love and beauty my last year at hillsdale in my senior thesis have become nearly too useful to bear thinking about. the ultimatum handed out by pain, the "either/or" but never the allowance to remain as we were... the conscious intention to lean into the pain and thereby make a mysterious metamorphosis into heartbreaking beauty, or to do what is most natural and harden. but to choose the latter also means to loose the thin-skinned dexterity of soul that allows the child to feel the subtle contours of existence in wide-eyed wonder. but, i don't know if i'm strong enough to choose weakness... i hate being weak. i hate being broken. jasmine is right: i do want the rules to be different for me.
i met up with an old demon of mine, one i had thought was cast into the outer darkness, or at least categorized, theorized, and argued into submission. but what is that passage that warns about the casting out of demons... that if the demon returns and finds the house swept clean but left empty, he will come back sevenfold... well, my old cosmic grievance of the unspeakable human suffering came back recently in the form of a dream. the dream began at the end of the tale and all was well. there were two characters who i knew loved each other and were good friends. one was unusually big and very strong, the other was barely the size of a child and obviously handicapped. but they loved each other and took care of each other. the lion and the lamb. but then i went back in time to observe what came before and it was horrifying. like a ghost whose only role is to observe, i roamed the planet, seeing unspeakable torment inflicted on nameless people i did not know and whom i could not help. then i caught sight of a familiar face, the deformed man-child from the beginning of my dream, but the context was completely changed. everything was not well. i watched him being humiliated and abused by different people. then i saw the bigger man who, too, had changed. and i watched him calculate the vulnerability of the smaller man and see that he could do whatever came into his head to do. and he did it. and as he prepared to rape the smaller man, i remembered the end (beginning) of the story and it was unbearable to think that the whole thing would be forgiven. i woke up screaming "no" and then sobbed in my bed, hardly conscious of doing it, "i won't forgive"...
very rarely does my subconscious come so close to the surface in such unmistakable clarity
