Curiouser and Curiouser

So tell me, how did it feel? To barter in pain. Did you feel ennobled? That you shared of yourself, of your pain, of your vision of a perfect world reflected in the writhing agony of my body at your feet? Did you see my soul, as a separate being, or was it an extension of your own? Was it easier that way, to explain to yourself, why it was necessary?

Or did you never bother with explanations? Was it just amoral release? The sheer joy of my destruction. a fellow living thing, that you could bring about, with just a few handy weapons? Was I an experiment in pain? Like … a lab rat perhaps?

Or was it a power trip? Did you like that you were master and I was slave? Was it because my skin color was dark? Did decimation of people darker than you seem like a natural conclusion to you? Or am I mixing you up with somebody else?

Or was it me in particular you hate? Did I show you my defiance one day, and make you decide, I would pay? Did you think it through? What you would do? What lure you would use? How long you would take? What sounds I would make?

Were you with me there, when I took that first bullet in my stomach? Did you feel my enrails rip liked a cheap blouse, hear them squelch together splattering blood everywhere. Do you see me as I come apart in mind and body, racked in agony, as my eyes turn first inward and then slowly sightless …

Did it give you a high? Was it all intensely sexual?

Is it likely that you see me, the person? I doubt it. That is the way my parents saw me, my friends, even acquaintances, people who saw me as someone. Not a piece of nature’s mechanics or God’s creation or a statistic, but as an entity much bigger than the sum of its parts…

Do I forgive you? I’m not sure… Does it matter? Is it even about you? You seem so sure it is… In all this, you seem so sure… It’s the most frightening thing, looking at the face of certainty… where none can exist…

I am gasping for breath now, I have not the time left to rail impotently against an unambiguous fate, an indifferent world, an unformed predator… I have no time left to feel pain or watch in horrified silence as my life ebbs away. Once the inevitable has been accepted, there is little else to do with dragging out the feeling. I have only time to think. To look at you and think and wonder and worry, why?

If you did tell me, of course, it is hardly likely to benefit anyone. Not that I can help the world armed with this secret knowledge… of life and death … Knowledge that you seem to have mastered so effortlessly…

Does that make you … God? Should all these squabbling religions take five, take notice, and worship … You? Your kind? Do you have a kind? Is God a collective? If you reproduced, will you call your children, Godspawn?

All the ironies run out free and clear and my time of significance is past. But, what a relief it would be to understand, why my life, that grew in harmony so many years, to the point of self-realization, that had just started fearfully hoping for a future, means nothing…