I have been awash in cynicism too long, with internal thorns lending no protection, no justifiable reason for their existence beyond the obvious – self harm – and that’s not justifiable. It’s masochistic. It’s self flagellation, these piercing daggers stemming from a nature of what? Callous self-preservation? A requirement to fit in and sip the dark nectar of what the crowds demand.
It’s not by any sane measurable need to keep this up and foster the sharpness of these barbs; to hold open these never healing, always fresh gashes and tears ripping apart my self worth like cheese cloth. They rarely come from the outside the castle, these attacks on my self sovereignty are always instigated by internal foes posing as friends, the image in the mirror that smiles back admirably but which plants the knife into your spine once you turn away. He’s a dark shadow that follows in the pitch of each evening and that sits as a gargoyle would protecting its territory and staking claim to the broken shards of a soul that never knew a complete picture.
The puzzle never was intended to be completed; it forever remains unsolvable as the cosmos and its swirling Heaven of gasses and luminescence, its fires that burn so hot yet so distantly that their light is a pinprick in the fragile fabric of seconds, hours, minutes and other pointless constructs that attempt to glue us to the logic of a failing universe. It doesn’t matter. It never did despite our ceaseless marches forward into the thick of war for beliefs that grasp like begging children for something bigger than us to hold onto. So pointless to sharpen the stakes and forever allow their points further depth into our souls where we bleed words in an endless spill that echos into the infinite, unheard and with a reason.
We cry because of this lack of an audience and allow the daggers to twist deeper when there’s no answer from the black. How is it that we keep this endless journey toward the dark at the back of our thinking when each wound screams out in hatred and fear and our eyes work with nothing but light? Don’t we trust what we see? The dance of life and the constant parade of sensation that is supposed to carry the empirical proof but which loses out again and again to the dark, the blood and the void of our experience. Is the pain more real? The dark more tangible than the light? It’s a strawberry sitting in a sea of mint and we reach for it, bidden by the memories of sweet and never realizing the surrounding field of green is what keeps us fresh; that the dark red is the bait to keep us feeling pain. It holds us in the dark.