Case 5: You

[Last part of the "Fiction Rebel" series]

I.

YOU ARE NEITHER the miracle of the universe nor the gift of god to mankind. You are simply the child of your father and mother, the fruit of the night they put the flesh to good use at the price of an overnight stay in a motel when half of the city is asleep. Now that you’re an adult, do not think that you are at the helm of everything. You are not in command of the world. Rather, you are at its mercy, an underling waiting to be fed by the spoils of other people’s little triumphs in life. It’s a distressing fate, but nobody said you will be born in a manger and grow to be the savior of the nations, a crown of thorns to grace your divine head and a golden scepter to bless your tired hands. You will be nailed many times over, however, and that is all. That’s the closest you will ever be to becoming a messiah. In twitter context, you are just a hashtag floating without a keyword.

You aspire for greatness because you are not anywhere near it, at least not yet. You try to bridge the gap but you keep it to yourself. You’re not the only one doing the same thing. This is the earth, mortal, home to more than a billion dreamers, so don’t act as if you are surprised. If at all you land squarely where the treasure lies, do not let one, two, or even a thousand trophies get in the way of a little humility. Fortune favors the brave, but blind ambition destroys the ambitious until not even his ambition is left. Nobody wants to be remembered as the person who won the race but made enemies along the way, unless you are Hitler. You are not Hitler. You are just a Grammar Nazi, a speck of dust in the literary world who can easily be swept aside by the weight of sheer semiotics, never to surface again in any book, not even as a footnote.

Do not think for a moment that you are the sui generis of all sui generis. You are Dick, and your delusion lacks the fitting adjective to bring it to the plains of human comprehension. Fix your nose first before you fix the rest of the world. You’ve been warned.



II.

You were fooled once, or you thought you were fooled only once. You easily trust people and things you’ve only known briefly, surrendering your life to whoever is bold enough to claim it for as long as they desire. Your conscience is clean, your heart more so, and you speak of purity as if you live it. You do, or you’ve tried, except that you’ve had your momentary suspicions trumping your confidence. No doubt you’ve had your mistakes. The measures you did to rectify them explain why you always see yourself as a clean slate after much reverie. You put too much thought into your life. But no one hears your musings of forever, of tender sentiments that echo the name of the one who owns it at a given time, because you prefer solitude each time you need someone who will listen.

Your belief in intelligent design suggests that there is an intelligent designer, someone whose genius includes the human body where the anus sits very close to the genitals, so close they could almost breathe each other if they had a nose. It’s like the sewerage is built right beside your home entertainment system. It is true that everything has its function, including your belief in intelligent design, and even your veneration of cows. Without it, Krishna will be rolling in the deep, probably chasing pavements, someone like you, and you’re not even Adele. Your faith in it has made you what you are: gullible but firm in your disposition. You are easy to sway, but you will stick to anything, or anyone, until you’ve realized that enough is enough.

Monica, my dear, you are already old enough to even pretend that you are still a teenager. Your life was once a mess. You’ve cleaned-up everything before you, and now you need to stop repeating the same errors before your life does. You owe it to yourself.



III.

You know you’re a liar because you have a ready excuse for each deception. But you never call it a lie. You call it selective exposition, careful declaration, or other terms for hogwash you can conjure. You only say half of the truth because to your heart and mind that is all that matters — half of everything. It’s better than nothing, so you say. The world will not stop revolving around the sun with just half of what it knows. Besides, what it does not know will not make it suffer, either. You champion the idea that ignorance is bliss, especially if it is ignorance others retain and it is bliss you gain. If you cannot find refuge in an expedient story, your protocol is to feign silence as if you’ve heard nothing and, finally, to interject a random question that has nothing to do with the conversation. Escape is always close, your words smooth as an alibi.

But if all else fails, you reduce yourself into tears. You cry and cry until you fall asleep, or until the guilt that should have been yours is now the responsibility of the accuser. You turn the tables, which is your way of raising your objection, a demurrer to an indefensible accusation, and leave it that way.

You think your style is suave, immune from being exposed as a scam. You think you can always get away with anything. You think no one will ever notice. But right from the start, you forgot that there is a reason why they call you the Hooligan. Your reputation precedes you. You are as bad as you can be, and you’re the only one denying it.



IV.

On a dreary evening, you begin to think that the moon shines between your knees. You think heaven is where your head is and the boundary between Italy and France is where your feet are, carefully traipsing that other side of the world you’ve only known through cheap wine and spaghetti. You think that the sky will readily clear itself of clouds whenever you want to witness the light from the stars afar, only to discover darkness across the universe because this is one of the nights perpetually ruined by your lack of desire to open your eyes. You want them shut tight. There is not much to see in the shadows anyway, not even yourself, for it is dark and there is little left of you. You are alone, a lonely soul in a tragic world of lonely people.

By morning, you think the sun will never burn your skin, so you take all the pleasure you can get from basking directly under its fiery glow. You bathe the sunshine as if it is the last dawn you will ever have. Then you start to suffer a burning sensation close to your bones, and for once you realize how life itself can make you feel most vulnerable simply by being alive, completely helpless under the majestic star that will continue to shower its flames in the distance long after you are gone.

You are Jane, and you have the right to write your obituary one of these days. You will make the impossible happen as if it is the most normal thing in the world.



V.

You are one or two or all of them, and you are nameless. Says John, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together,” and says again, “I am the eggman. They are the eggmen,” until finally, “I am the walrus.”





Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5