It's a Pity

Call it a Catholic upbringing or what have you, but I'm afraid I will always see something fetid, something false, in normal human conversation. The game of human beings reacting and feeding off of each others cues, living in the moment, imagining ourselves to lose ourselves. It is a lie. It is a foulness. Or simple bitterness on my part more than likely. Yet I can not help but feel slightly nauseous when I see people lost in conversation with each other. Can't help but feel ashamed of myself when a familiar face makes me feel happy. Utterly baffled when a friend shares something about himself to me with matter-of-fact ease. Several years ago I told an older woman that I lived alone and she was shocked. She said that she couldn't imagine spending an hour of her day without having someone to talk to. Her statement filled me with a white rage that terrifies me to this day.


It is often said that writers are supposed to be filled with uncontrollable passions? Well who the hell taught you that? That rapist Bryon? That drunken thug Hemingway? Is there, at any rate, nothing we can possibly feel passionate about besides the fellow shaved monkeys around us?

I write because my interior dialogue is the only one that is unshielded, and this cannot change. This is who a human being really is, the swirling yokes of feeling and thought and sensation that cannot be released to another through speech or touch or look. Our true selves can only be found by staring within ourselves and giving shapes to these half-comprehended shades. It is then and only then that we can know who we love and who we hate and who simply amuses us and why. But we can never know them. We can only know what we are to us. The world and everyone in it but you will always be objects to you. If we cannot know each other than the best we can do is to love and emphasize, to realize that the isolation we have all been damned to will ultimately hit the extroverts the hardest. Their light hearts will surely beat longer than others, and so to them goes the honor of burying lovers and friends until they see, until they know, and than there will be no one to talk to.