Life is ripples, waves. Motion and counter-motion, action and reaction. Sometimes things happen just right; the pattern completes itself, sustains itself, becomes itself. More often events jangle, discordant, producing strange music.
And sometimes the wire’s pulled to tight in search of the right notes, and snaps.
And then, the worst of all fates: silence.
…
I know. I KNOW.
I know it intimately, deeply, painfully, crucially.
I see the permutations branching from the points of crisis. Explanations and excuses, a million shapes of things to come.
All evil will come to pass. Who said that?
I see a thousand things it could be, and I know I don’t see it all. I know that other possibilities creep around like stickly spiders in the dark corners of my brain. That I’ll forget, that I’ll remember, that I’ll regret, that I’ll relent.
…
Once I was so sure.
I knew what I was, what I chose. I was the bent and crooked tree, growing wrong and not at all sorry about it.
My life hurt, because it didn’t fit the shape of the world around it. Things that should have been trivial became crises. I had to skirt around the edges, hoping there was a back way through.
But it was worth it. I chose it because I wanted it, because I thought I’d found something that suited me better.
Because I’ve seen what the game does to people like me when they try to play it straight. Because I’d have been a suicide, and I’d rather see if there’s any other shows in town before draining all that red out on the carpet.
And I was fucking right.
I was vindicated, over and over again. I grew up strange and inherited a kingdom. So what if it was a lonely place with withering gardens. As I came into my own, other people found in me things that they were missing.
Few and far between. Rare and getting rarer. I think everyone who’s managed to get to this point in their lives has to be pretty good at faking it. Or maybe I’m just too functional. My friends back home seem to still find them, at their community colleges and minimum-wage jobs. And I wonder how many are locked up in a single-bedroom apartment most nights. Just like me.
A handful of precious little moments, of strangers open and aching and dying for a bite of the fruit from the poisoned tree I’ve been tending all my life.
Nothing’s better than doing what you’re not supposed to and finding out you were right all along.
But.
…
It’s the funny thing, you know. When you’re young and stupid and pain is barely even real, when you don’t know enough to even begin to imagine how completely you can fail.
Even if you get it right, you get to find out how close you came to the abyss. How thin the thread of your life is.
How easy it is to wind it just a little too tight. And snap.
…
And you never learn how far is far enough. You never get there, unless you do, at which point who gives a shit?
Once I thought far enough was enough, and it was for a little while, until it wasn’t.
And then again, I thought I’d found it. I thought I would be whole, just a little further, just another step and a taste and the blood would flow endless and forever, the heart would keep beating, the stars would keep burning through the sky.
So I kept going until I went too far. Until my will and anger broke like a wave upon the implacable shore. And, silence.
So I stopped. To think. To figure out what to do next. Killing time and waiting for things to become clearer, learning and dreaming and howling at the moon.
…
This is how they got Orpheus, you know.
Maybe it’s just a little further. Maybe I just haven’t gone far enough. Maybe I’ve just put too much energy into the facade, maybe I’m trying too hard to both be me and be the person I’m pretending to be to get through ordinary life.
But no, my heart is sick and I’m wracked with indecision.
I look back. The world doesn’t look the same as it did back when I was a kid, after all. Back when I was making deals with demons just to get by, because I didn’t have any other options.
Maybe I got it all wrong.
…
I read somewhere, about that story. About Orpheus and Eurydice. That Hades knew he was going to fuck it up.
The whole point was, that if Orpheus’ love was true, his conviction strong, he’d have just killed himself to be with Eurydice in hell. And Hades knew it, he knew that was Orpheus’ failing, so he let him try to take her out - but only if he didn’t look back, only if he could be sure, only if his will was ironclad and he didn’t doubt. But he did, because that’s the story, because that’s who Orpheus is.
Story has a happy ending, though. Once he accepts the price, and the necessity of paying it.
…
A thousand, a hundred thousand possibilities, of ways I could be wrong and how I need to consider this or that, of how I can’t be sure it wasn’t really this way or that and…
A quiet, solemn voice whispers “It’s just a little further.”
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