Beyond Deception as a Victor

It was then that I knew that my world was ending. Jamie took my hand and squeezed it, her lips spilling words I didn't hear, her eyes releasing her surplus of emotion. And so came the end in the middle of the beginning, a breath taken in and released, and I knew my world was ending.

When the funeral procession dragged across my bleeding thoughts, I saw Jamie standing a little bit away, pouring forth a river from her never ending soul. Inside my heart a voice cried out to her, but she had long been blinded to my words and I had forgotten how to communicate.

My life had been a veil and I unwillingly hid behind disabilities and handicaps, two words that shaped my future like patronizing hands. If I could perhaps discover my tongue inside the folds and caves of tender silence, maybe I could show that titles are simply a name. But for now I only had eyes and a mind that could not be quieted, and I watched with a dead sort of eagerness.

I saw him with Jamie often enough, even after the grass was green over the disturbed soil and the stone worn of gloss. He showed a reckless, daring sort of love that Jamie countered with her gentle and tearful ways. In time he became part of her, part of the idea she held, part of the air she breathed. It was counterintuitive that she hold him to her body when all in all, he would one day rest under the same soil, with or without the beautiful girl that seemed to float on insecurities.

The tutors came and went, but each had a shortcoming that sent them down the path of the Condescenders. Therapist and counselors were discarded with old memories, and although I clung to the milestones, they left Jamie's mind like unimportant insects. She had a Laugh-Giver and a Love-Offering and the words associated with my face grew until they were all anyone could see anymore.

I fought to believe that I wasn't drowning and that there was still air at some indefinite height that I could reach if I swam long enough. The dreams I stored were like butterflies and I prayed that they wouldn't leave in my sleep.

When Jamie was in white and was beautiful, I sat on the steps and I watched her, invisible to the cultured and forgotten to the thoughtful. Like a day, my world had ended and with it left the prizes I had gained and the truth I had entrusted in a fallible mind. Now controlled the assumptions, the impressions, the judgements, and the nights were a startling release from the tongues that did not rest.

Before long, Jamie had disappeared and left me with an empty house full of haunting illusions. And yet I struggled and I breathed and I worked, and the untarnished pages refused to burn with my wishes.

My mind was still young and my thoughts were not dull, but my voice had been lost in the wind and with death, and before death, and before life, and it was predestined and it was how it should be.

Of the two expressions I had not lost, only one was screaming. The other was more subtly discovered, like a face never forgotten or a sound always remembered. In my youthful desperation, I had misplaced the power of no names and had started believing the lies that Jamie lived. But I was not dead and I was not dull and I will not be silenced.

And when the music played, my voice mingled with the notes and again I breathed.

Life As Practical

It's a bloody business, this war and killing and all. I suppose you get used to it eventually; deaf to the gunshots like you callus to hard labor, blind to the gore like the sun becomes dim to your eyes. One letter after another floats in from unfamiliar hands, with unfamiliar writing tracing familiar dust-pictures of familiar faces, and one begins to wonder how long it will take to be hard to the pain like one is deaf to the noise.

It's bloody brutal, though, bloody brutal business, and I've seen enough of it to be eternally dulled to the reason behind it all.

Eventually, though, you learn. You learn how to deal with it. You learn to crush the pain and loneliness down into a hard stone in your chest, and you learn how to swallow sand and you learn how to drink saltwater and to look away. You learn to be the seeing blind, you learn to be the hearing deaf, you learn to be ignorant. I don't cry anymore. You gotta learn to stop crying. There's not much question about it. You've only got two choices, and that's either to be soft and continually hurt, or to be hard and emotionless but never injured.

You learn that physical pain is infinitely easier than emotional pain, and physical pain is far easier to control. I've got scars on my arms from that learning process. When one inflicts injury on one's self in a physical manner, it's a sign of emotional weakness. I didn't know that then. I'm better now.

It's still a bloody business, and you still see sights horrible enough to make your soul shatter, and you'll still hear screams long into the night when, in a perfect world, we'd all be sleeping and content. You still see corpses of former acquaintences, but you don't recognize them on an emotional level. Emotions are dangerous when you're here. You can't let them affect your vision or you'll be sightless for the rest of your life. You've gotta be hard. Like me. Gotta be hard like me.

You learn not to make friends, too. Friends, in a perfect world, would be there to get your back when you fall, but not here. Nah. Here friends are a danger to your soul, because if you're soul's not as solid as ice then you'll never survive. What's worse, to see your love die in a friend or to see that love turn to hate in the moment of betrayal? Doesn't matter. You can avoid it both.

Never said I liked it. Never said it's what I would want, but it's what's gotta be, and you gotta learn to survive here. You gotta learn that silence is better than words in any situation, and to show feeling is to bare your chest for the blade. It's just how it is. It's a hard lesson to learn but it's the only one worth teaching.

Bloody brutal business, though. Bloody brutal.