Long, Long While

The treacherous word he said to her stayed with her until the moment she met someone else. Not someone who was a lover or beautiful or even interesting, but someone that also knew what it was to be a complete failure.

She pleaded to them with a smile and they nodded peacefully, before simply saying a different words, some that would touch her for years to come.

“We are not the same. We are both failures, that much is true. But the difference is that you have a chance to recover from the weakness of your own mind. It is a sickness that will strangle you when you least expect it, but also, when you most expect it. You can’t escape from yourself, unfortunately, not while you are on the land of the living. So you will have to accept what has happened to you, and live with the eternal, debilitating reality that this is who you are, whether you wanted to or not. Look at yourself in the mirror and understand. Understand that you are wrong and that you are right. That you lived enough and have not lived enough. But if you so wish, you can change little and that little centimeter can be the difference between a smile and a frown, or death or life, or just, being a total fuckup or a total fucking idiot.”

She considered what she was being told, both confused, but also with a strange elated feeling of dispossession, as if all the responsibility was being lifted off her shoulders. Some emotions within her were so horrifying that it couldn’t be anything else but a hatred for herself that was so unhealthy, but some were so beautiful that they could only be a miracle.

“Set me free,” she thought to herself to no one in particular. The person she had met, the one who was so similar to her, they simply smiled vacantly at the world that was passing them both by. “I can be set free, like you. Or not like you. One of us has to be wrong, and one has to be right, and with that, one can live with the regret and the honor of both things at once.”

They thought about it, but didn’t say what they were really thinking. It was a horrid taste to see in the real world, to have her watch them slowly dissipate away into a life that was transforming into death.

“You had a point. We are so similar now, but I don’t want to be like you anymore,” she said and they nodded so hard that their head fell off and the whole façade of their fake, awful personality melted in all directions. Their bones broke and splintered and the eyes bulged and exploded.

“You understood,” the decaying mouth said. “You understood it, in time. Not like me. So now you can go on… and be yourself, no matter how horrible it might be.”

She laughed and nodded heavily, but they did not seem to notice her anymore. It was all done. Decades, and years, and days had passed, but she didn’t care, for the world, the world she had made, the one in front of her and only through her, was ready to be chewed and taken.

“A scary thought,” she said to herself. “But a wondrous one too. Nothing more.”