Silently Screaming Out Loud

My voice has been quiet of late – quieter than I intended it to be. I’ve realized a truth about myself recently, and that’s when things aren’t going well, I grow silent. I don’t like to report bad news, and I don’t like to trouble others with my problems if I can avoid it. If you haven’t heard from me in a while, there’s probably something very wrong indeed.

There are three things that I want, and each calls to me with its siren’s song. Contemplation of each aspiration causes a palpable sense of exquisite torture; for I’ve tasted of genuine rapture when, for a too-brief while, each of these things was nearly within my reach. Fingertips brushed ever so lightly across a facet and translated to me such a transcendent joy, absorbing a fraction of my soul. My failures tore me away from the objects of my desire, but my soul stayed behind each time. Lying on the ground, ripped open and bleeding, my agony sought a distraction to ease the loss, each time finding one. Thrice have I found my ultimate reward, and more than thrice has my objective been
(wrought)
(ripped)
(wrenched)
removed from my longing grasp. I suffer also with the knowledge that I have had for some time the ability to earn each of these things in full, but my own failures and weaknesses are what caused me to lose them each in turn, time and again. That makes it all
so
much
worse.

The treasures sit at the end of long and winding roads. Each failed attempt to traverse them makes the next trip more difficult; by now I see naught but craggy, treacherous paths which threaten to rend flesh from bone at the slightest misstep. The rewards, however, are so great I’d gladly make each journey a hundred, hundred times if I believed there were ever a hope of reaching the end.

And there is hope, for there is always hope. And I believe, because to do anything but believe is to fail before I take the first step.

Yet the paths do not converge. Nothing is ever simple.

The first of these paths I’ve been on for many years, falling off for vast stretches of time, gaining ground and backsliding in a repetitive set of tumbles. The second path includes a precipice across which I’ve leapt more than once, and currently I await the knowledge of whether or not I’m going to land safely. And the final path continually shifts directions before my eyes, an ever-altering labyrinth which threatens to vanish entirely; constantly I pray it doesn’t disappear with me inside, before I reach either the end or an exit.

I’m being quite intentionally vague. I’m not the only person involved in the actions I take, and I won’t risk my words causing undue influence within the worlds affected by what can be read here.

From time to time I ask myself, “Do I have a chance?” This is always followed by, “Do I have a choice?” My answer to the latter is an unqualified “No.” I think of the shape of my life when I just let things be; it is worse than a formless, meaningless void. It’s remembering a snatch of a song so wondrous it made you cry, but you’ll never recapture that feeling unless you hear it once more and you can’t remember what it’s called or where you heard it. It’s forgetting the punch line to a joke so funny it once brightened your mood for a week, and the feeling is replaced with the dread that you’ll never feel that good again. It’s the gathering you chose not to attend where you would have seen someone you dearly love, but you didn’t and now they’ve died and you never said goodbye.

The only guarantee is the knowledge that if I quit while there’s still breath in my body, my remaining existence will be so shallow that nothing will ever have true meaning again. Even failure will allow me to retain self-respect and the ability to try again in a way that quitting wouldn’t. I know to have all three things I want is impossible unless my life is influenced beyond my control. Two victories would sustain me for years, incomplete though it would be. A single gain would leave me cynical, but not so terribly that I wouldn’t be able to continue to try. But if I truly lose all three, I will surely lapse into the sleep of despair from which I will never awaken without help.

"I came up with a new game-show idea recently. It's called The Old Game. You got three old guys with loaded guns onstage. They look back at their lives, see who they were, what they accomplished, how close they came to realizing their dreams. The winner is the one who doesn't blow his brains out. He gets a refrigerator."