The Ugly Parts

I've spent the past two days in a haze of nauseating vertigo, an unyielding sense of imbalance and exposure, and along with the physical drain I have felt my sanity slowly seep out through the pores. I am at a breaking point, and I suddenly understand, more than ever before, what makes people do horrible things. It isn't evil. It isn't desperation. It is a fine tuning of the senses. A parting from the ordinary, because that ordinary suffocates. These horrible things dart in and out of the lines that bind us all in structure, in formality. Therein lies the problem, and the solution. Tangled together, they cancel out one another, and where that leaves us is anyone's guess.

The days leading up to today: what a horrible place indeed. The shooting. All of those innocent children. Innocence, the most prized possession among us, slain before our very eyes. I have tried to block it out because I knew what it would do to me. But to block out humanity, and the flaws within, has proved impossible. Tidbits have floated through my mind and have left behind a sickening residue of grief. I can't begin to know what it is to lose a child, but I have known the fault of taking a child for granted, of wishing for an escape, for playing the part of a prisoner to all I once found freedom in. I have known the loss of all I had, and while not altogether the same as death, it is a death, it is, and I feel too much-not enough-for families I have never met, for children I have never nursed, because in each of them I see myself, and every life lost is a scar on my heart reopened. I see murder as an escape, as a saving of what could have been. These lives remained innocent to the end. What of the rest of us? We are left here to grow old and sour. I hate us all for that.

Part of me wishes the world would end tomorrow. No more worry of pain, of the potential of God or gods, of prophecies unfolding, of mischief and religion and apathy and lies. Wrong or right, the fight would be over. No more speculating. No more second chances, or the dance of doubts that so often tires even the most faithful. I don't want to know how bad things could still get. I don't want to know what dying feels like; I only want a clear and soundless death. I want all the pain to end, the madness, the heartlessness. I want the rich to stop complaining about their rich lives, as if they know what it is to be poor. I want the poor to eat a fine dinner, or have a home that does not feel borrowed and lacking, to know what it is to only worry about the simple things that rich people do. I want the murderers to know what the piercing of their skin feels like, that harsh blow to the insides. I want the victims to know what holding the solidity of a life in their own hands feels like. I want the political to just shut up and listen. I want the spiritual to pray diligently, whether their god is real or not. I want their mouths to be silenced, their souls laid open like gutted fish. Be still and know. Be still and know.

I make no apology for my thoughts. I explain nothing. Doubts and hope spout their cases ear by ear, but nothing sounds as loud as my own fear. And from that fear comes a numbness, a way of blinding the worst of it, the ugly parts, the truth.