“And what if I’m angry at the world?

” I asked her, imitating the style and accent of those literary

heroes of mine. “And what if I think that everyone and everything should suffer tremendously
because I had not gotten what I so wished to have? Is my anger any less real because I believe
that everything should plunge into an infinite oblivion, that all should disappear into nothingness
and stay that way, because all the world is is a trammel of pain and suffering and loss and
worthlessness—simply, that life is not worth it. That nothing is worth it. What of it?”
“There are things worth living for,” she said, eyes fierce as a glowing furnace.
“And what, for instance?”
“Love,” she said. “Love is worth living for.”
“But what is love if not the mechanistic machinations of our brain?—a release of intoxicating
chemicals meant to invigorate us for the perpetuation of the species.” My hands clenched a white
steel. “Should this then be worth dying for? You will die for a mere chemical? A mere
intoxication? A mere bearing-down of base instincts?”
She had nothing to say.
“And,” I added quickly, “and, my friend”—I saw her eyes shatter when I said this—“what is the
point of trying to convince me? I’m the dreg lying at the bottom of a wineglass, the colloidal
substance drifting in the purgatory of an unrefined solution. The world would be better off
without me! But that is to say that evil does not have its part in the world, which is not at all
true.”
I felt my lips quiver in excitement; I felt the words form there, like nebulous beings given shape.
“And you! You’re much, much better, are you not? Look at you! Your life stands on a
foundation quite unlike mine, deprived of any cracks, not riddled with holes, not infested with
the worms of your past, not even rippling with darkness and shadows, while a destructive
minotaur awaits you in your labyrinthian mind.”
I made sure to tone my words perfectly, so that each syllable was a derisive dagger stabbing her.
That they were like snakes feeding on the vitality of another, sucking them dry, so to speak, in
order to absorb life, to give life to the predator, to the pest, to the monster.
Her eyes shimmered. “You’re hurting me, Jack. So much. I don’t understand you. But you mock
me and that hurts.”
“Am I?” I asked. “Good.”
I took out a cigarette, pressed it between my lips, puffed. The tendrils glowed in the still evening,
the expanse of city-hustle still alive, still beating, pounding like some gorilla unable to be killed
no matter how many times you stab it.
“Good-by, Jack.”
I said nothing.
Her footsteps sounded in the dark, the leaves rustle-dancing to a tune I could barely hear. I barely
felt the night breeze. I barely tasted the smoke, the ash, the soot. I barely smelled the brine
wafting over.
I barely cried.
That was the only thing I ever wanted, perhaps. To renew my vigor in life; to recover myself
from the mire I’d created; to dig into myself and cast anew the iron around me. That is, I wanted
to experience life. But not just life. Not the little spectrum of experiences and happenstances and
chances because I was born this way.
Fuck that.
I wanted to feel every gentle breeze and listen, actually listen. I wanted so much to feel a song
and let it flood over me and plague me and save me. I wanted to stop thinking and stop lying and
stop forging new identities that drowned me in facts peculiar only to those masks. I wanted to be
able to save myself from rock-bottom. But that wasn’t what I expected myself to do. So, I get a
pickaxe and I dig. Farther. Much farther.
“Why?” I asked, aloud.
I don’t know. I really don’t know.