Isaac
I had a fantasy about committing suicide again today.
This time it was in my car, cruising down the endless roads, wind in my hair and the radio crackling with my favourite music. There was something in the middle of the road – a mass of metal, folded and corrupted at wind-screen height. It rose out of the surface of the road like a spear. I laughed as I saw it, and saw my approaching doom. I laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation. More than twenty years on the earth and able to end it in a millisecond. I laughed at the futility of survival, at the craziness of the struggle to exist. I laughed at the hundreds of people who had put their time into making me what I was, and I laughed too at the society that thought it was helping people by giving them purpose and direction.
I laughed at the grey-haired man sixty years hence who I would become, embittered and cold at a world which had robbed him of youth, drive, passion and pleasure at the heel of the establishment, and at the bequest of nature's drive to survive. I laughed at his cold, unfeeling lips as they failed to even rise to the hint of a smile. I laughed at his brow, furrowed and wrinkled. I laughed at his eyes – too old, and having seen too much.
Oh yes, I laughed.
I wondered idly how much time a person would have to feel death with their head being smashed in. Would it all be over in a second? A short, sharp, unimaginable pain with blissful serenity on the other side? Would it simply be like suddenly falling asleep? Would I wake up in paradise, or hell?
What if the last thing you felt when you died lasted for eternity? What if all death is is the negative experience of dying forever?
In my fantasy I swerved, and the car skidded across the tarmac, breaks squealing their way across the road until finally I came to a stop.
I wasn't laughing.
It would be a cruel trick, indeed, if all life is is suffering. Whether we were the chosen playthings for an omnipotent dictator or a freak act of nature – all of existence is desire. What we lack, we seek, and it is so much a part of us that even when we do not lack, we still seek.
We are so programmed to consume and become populous and gnash our teeth at our rivals that we relish and seek out that conflict. We feel empty and hollow without the adrenaline-fuelled blood of competition forcing its way through our veins. Each moment is another chance for us to prove we matter and prove that our enjoyment is worth our suffering.
Perhaps we're already damned, in that sense. I know I'm not alone in speculating on that. What if this world is hell? It is said that for a cursed man, good food turns to ash in his mouth, and fine wine no longer satisfies. Even the tender flesh of another of a person's preference will not sate a lust so eternal as that. But we are happy when we eat, are we not? We are satisfied by our couplings, are we not? We do not desire more... do we?
If only it were everyone who could enjoy the freedom we have! To eat, to practice religion, to say what we feel, to mean what we say, to access the greatest wealth of information in the world, and to forego it's usefulness – we lucky souls who have that choice. After all, it could be worse.
It could be worse.
I woke up next to my girlfriend, her naked back pressed against my front, our skin warm and tingly in the cold night breeze. If I touched her breast I could feel her heartbeat, and in the dark I can hear her breathing. I can feel the tiniest movement of her body, and feel the smallest displays of affection returned a thousand-fold.
How could I ever tell her it means nothing to me?
Cassi
There is nothing more dearly beautiful than the present moment, my love. We share it together, and unlike anything else, the time is not halved and somehow lost to us both from it's sharing, but instead it is multiplied. It grows, stretching on like our fingertips, and folding around us like arms, 'til forever is just a half-whispered breath on the end of my tongue, and I writhe contentedly in the heat of your arms.
It is the moment before sunset, where the sun finds a gap between the sky and earth, and lights the clouds red from beneath. The heavens sparkle for us, and breathless though we are, we breath heavy of one another, inhaling in desire...
...and yet not of desire. For what beauty is there in the caged bird? I do not long for you to be trapped beneath my heel, as much as I do not long for my heart to be confined. I do not wish to possess you, my silly thing – but to watch and move with you. The spark that fills my world with joy is the same which fills your wings, and when you fly, we fly.
Do you dream, I wonder, of unconditional love, where affection is freely given and never taken, but always welcome for it's part? My star-walker lover, do you feel the beating of my heart as if to challenge the endlessness of time? I live before the world, and in doing so I live despite the world. I am the anomaly in your statistics, I am the diamond in so much rough.
Do you see, I wonder, the sparkle in your eye, perhaps reflected in mine so dull? Perhaps you mistake it for my own, for no beauty is so great as that in the eye of the beholder.
Your lips and your smile are portals to world I can never know – the wonderful, tremendous thoughts locked in your imagination behind impatient looks.
Do you love me? I'll never ask, for fear of never really knowing. Such questions only exist in future lives, where questions gain relevance from kindling doubt, but present fires extinguish all sadness and loss. I press back against you, feeling your warmth, so strange and fragile to my touch. The future can hang, for this moment there is naught but joy.
Arbiter
Do you see as I see? Hear as I see? Feel as I feel?
There are gaps, you see, in understanding between you and I. When my eye is open the world is different to the world you see when my eye is closed and yours opens in it's place. Perhaps it is doubt that drives us on to new experience. Perhaps that's why we're still together, after all this time.
The mystery... ...what's love got to do with that?
Are you... I'm searching for a word. Happy? Sad? Depressed? ...alive or dead? Are you... there? The radio is playing an old song. It's Play Crack the Sky, by Brand New, and we're looking at each other, and then at our feet. I open my mouth, but all the words have already left, and in leaving they also left their mark on us.
“Love is a risk, to always get hit out of nowhere by some wave and end up on your own.”
And in a moment, all moments are one, and all moments are gone.
Are you there?
Or is this bed empty? With the loss of you, what more can I do? What more could I have done? I had to be happy. I needed it more than anything I've ever desired in my life. I needed it more than you.
Should I set you free? Do you love to be free of me?
