Better

I have deep, vast capacities for so much. All of those so-called mental illnesses which I have in spades, unmedicated, left to run their courses as they will and do, both contribute to and deny the fulfilment of those capacities. Not bouncing, but moving with deliberation, with foresight, with reckless abandon, I plunge into the darkest of abysms, immersing myself in the dankest, filthiest of mires.

Why? Because when faced with evils, with choices between right and wrong, good and bad, I choose not only wrong and bad, every time, but the wrong and the bad I have yet to experience. This may sound wholly perverse to you, but to me it is, rather, a destiny, a mission. How else could I be an eater of sins. Yes, I eat the sins of others. I swallow them whole. I do so that the anguish caused by those trespasses might be borne by me. I do not pardon the penalties for the sins, of course. How could I? Is it not known that the penalty for sin is death? I am no murderer, no agent of expiation. Redemption must be sought elsewhere. Fearless, though, and guiltless, as the crimes are not mine, I believe that I can eat the sins of the culpable, devour them inviolate, undiluted, diminishing the consequences to the erring by embracing those outcomes to myself, my ransom, but another gauntlet away, another battle waged and won, another foe subdued. The gauntlets were, after all, but mine alone to run. As destiny may not be coerced, cajoled, or counted on, how else were I to eat the sins of others? There is no guilt without sin, no sin without offence. But offence wrongly taken may not be made justified, rendering nil the sin, rendering the offence controvertible. This is where I enter, I, an eater of sin, equivocal. Dauntless in the fight, defying all hypocrisy, a knight-errant on errands of destiny, a vigilante, rectifying, delivering retribution where all other justice is duplicity.

Yet none of this makes me a good man; and certainly not a better man. Normal, decent people expect, deserve, similarly dependable, obliging, ordinary, reasonable people. Nearly pathologically anti-social, however much I might pretend otherwise, on occasion, I live on the fringe, a constant observer, never averting my eyes, yet never fully engaging, that my contribution might be perceived as that of value. Am I living in Disneyland? No fucking way. I loathe, abhor, and despise that pedestrian pretence. There are only mediocrity and obsession. Everything and everyone to which, to whom I grant notice, attention, interest, fascination, obsession, love, exists, arises, dwells, in mystery rather than in identity. I do not want the truth. I do not want the light. I do not want definition. Concealment and invention are more alluring to me than honesty and reality.

Of course, I am well aware that the normality of others, within a context of familiarity, predictability, within a setting of conventionality, envelopes them in an embrace of comfort, of contentment, of gratification. Often, I have paused, lingered, stood back, tears rolling down my cheeks, as I have witnessed the commonplace happiness of others, a happiness I will never know, can never know. Those women are the better women; those men are the better men. For me, instead, life has been a continual romance with pain. Less so, now, perhaps, as I have begun, at long last, to revel, too, in joy. That transcendental bliss, though, however fleeting, is the pigment of my infatuation, the figment of my imagination, a reality born of a belief, born of a perception, delivered unto a specific vantage point, peculiar to me, to me alone. I cannot share. My synæsthetic interpretation on the world, sense-based, rather than contrived in a mind deprived of sense, casts me into a space entirely my own.

Of course, too, like you, like all very intelligent people, my intelligence – one of my exceptional capacities – ostracises me from the general population. Unlike you, though, and many other intelligent people, I am unable to find belonging,  compatibility, refuge amongst those so different from myself. I find sociability pathetic. It is a weakness, like cowardice, like fear, I cannot tolerate. Not a leader, nor a follower, I must, and have, learned to be alone. You suggested once that I needed friends. You were incorrect. Nothing has ever been about garnering friends. Those appearances were merely dalliances with the Devil; the Devil wrapped around my little finger. Here and there, between the extremes of my bi-polar psychosis, most momentarily, I contemplate normalcy. There is nothing there for me.

I am sorry that I could not have been better for you, and, indirectly, for those who presume to know me through you.

Regrettably, or gratefully, I am as I appear, I appear as I am. Better to be hated for who I am, than to be loved for who I am not.