Cursed

What black mark was inscribed on my forehead at birth, what sign of evil scratched on my door? While all the other children played their simple-minded games, who told them what I was and why I must be feared? An aura of darkness permeates all my social contacts, a curse impedes my very existence--an existence which can only be a blight upon the universe which the earth and all its inhabitants strive daily to exterminate.

Standing in the shadows, hiding from the baleful eye of God, my steps pass isolation on one side and grief on the other. The clock marks each destructive event, counting away the pain without a pause, and the only end in sight the very end of ME. My body broken over the knee of Fate, after it was beaten day in and day out for no known reason.

Is it merely that defiant gaze, a refusal to submit, to admit to any wrong? An angry child glowering at the unfair world, dark eyes holding in their depths a checklist of capriciously inflicted wounds, threatening only in that knowledge of hurts which can never be acknowledged and so must be destroyed. Does the universe cover up its crimes like an abusive mother, burying the evidence, leaving only the eyes to tell the story? But who would see? A multitude of accomplices instead crowd me in, hostile and cruel.

I have no higher power to which to plead for rescue, no refuge to hide within. Everything and everywhere is the hand of that punishing force. My only defence is my very insignificance, on which pain casts doubt as each insubstantial blow hits flesh. And if I fight back, I become the monster I see in every eye, and so must face the monster's fate: a typecast villain inescapeably defeated by the Good, never knowing who drew those lines in the sand and why I ended up on one side and my enemies on the other.

Why must I always be wrong? Why am I the Evil and they the Good? There is no impartial scale on which were weighed my transgressions, but an arbitrary assessment conducted, overlooking the crimes of others while tallying my every virtue against me as a vice. Am I to take from this incomprehensible prejudice my own illegitimacy in the world? The child of some absent universe, a changeling soul adrift in a foreign land? But am I ever to be retrieved or merely to be destroyed, left to cry on the doorstep until I am worn down by weather and die of sorrow.

And that hypothetical Absolute Good which I seem to have violated? Is it not a simply some intangible value we were taught to seek? Like a culture taught which skin is better, which weight, which color of eye... How can creatures always presented with a blue sky measure the comparative attractive qualities of red, or green, or yellow? We only see beauty in what is, at essence, a part of ourselves: the ultimate narcissistic evaluation of our universe. Am I not beautiful? Are not the shadows of evening, painted in blues and purples and black, a beauty of contrast and haunting threat? A building burning, a figure dying in splendid, absolute abandon: how can we not accept these images as well? Or are we looking through the eye of a beholder raised on simple cartoons, simple plots, where only the daisies in the field can touch our hearts?

My crime, my ultimate failing, must be rooted in that misunderstanding. I am missing that one part of humanity that allows me to judge the world around me in an arbitrary and unthinking manner, without ever questioning my conclusions or imagining the view beyond my own narrow circle of companions. I drink it all in--shadow and light, right and wrong, clear and clouded--without ever filtering it through that necessary colander of Moral Code. I want to hold everything in my mind, I want to defy my own preconceptions. I want to see in the dark like a predatory cat, moving outside the edges of civilisation, abandoned and dangerous. But there is a power in that solitude, a brilliance that exists only in its violation of boundaries.

And so I find myself twisting pain into art, using my misery for inspiration, like so many before me. For Disney does not create Goethe. And perhaps this is the most amusing irony of all: that the very things which the universe is maliciously destroying are its most intriguing and stunning creations. Worn by ice and wind and floods and time, I can stand by the Grand Canyon and smile. That insubstantial force can beat me down, but it can never win. I will always be something more than its billions of obedient lackeys. Whatever grief and misery I face, that is my comfort. No matter my end, my life was such that I have already said my peace, I have already spit in the eye of God.

copyright 2002 mleiv, any reproduction or distribution expressly prohibited