Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Untouchable.

I am wholly, utterly, inarguably replaceable. Please don't think for a second that this is a cry for attention, or some sort of desperate prosaic plea for pity. Quite the opposite, admire me. Look how I phosphoresce in the dark. Am I not a proud, strong lizard, clinging to the Tree with all the knowledge that I glean from its bark? Do I not lap from its sap, drawn from beneath the earth and cycling lonely towards the heavens? Is this sap not now the only fluid in my veins? Regardless, I am replaceable, just as you are replaceable, and in this acknowledgment I am untouchable.

I am wholly and utterly replaceable, but I am not ashamed to admit it. I admit insignificance, I admit to my being eventually swallowed whole and digested and shat unto the stars. And in embracing my quantum negation of being, in embracing my interchangeableness, I am untouchable and immortal. I consume love and I rail fear into my damaged nostrils. They have similar effects, they are borne from the same bosom. And they are both negligible, only passive side effects of our selfish human condition. Ignore them and move on. The hangover from these drugs, the dopesickness from a brain cooking itself in the juices of its own passionate cries of self-importance, is enough to bring the proudest men to their knees. These tremors will fade with time, leaving only a grinning, proud skeleton that retains its ambulatory nature and ghost-dances all over the bones of those who put stock into the ephemeral.

I am utterly replaceable and find strength in this realization, strength that they will shudder before, they who feign to ignore their own similitude with every oyster and whale that has ever quivered up from the depths of time. How awesome the mollusk who knows enough to crack open his own brutal and ugly carapace, indiscernible from his weak and fleshy neighbors through the subjective eyes of the gods, and who rends his own guts to pieces to find that pearl and exploit its strengths.

I'm still angry, Lord knows, but I'm learning to soften the blows. I should learn to put anger aside, but I've yet to find a more efficient fuel. I will not let myself be driven mad by what I feel is missing from my life. I will not relinquish those reins to you. This anger is mine, and it is in clear and righteous definition. It is a healthy rage that liberates. I deny every law and right and preconceived notion given unto me since birth. They are naught but the shackles our parents have left for us in their will, baubles found discarded on the same well-worn paths that we have followed since the dawn of man. I will rewrite myself, and I will burn your books. I am a shark in bloody, bloody water. I will keep swimming forward and never look elsewhere with any romantic hindsight, if only to forget how bad I still hurt, if only to deny myself the realization that the only blood in the water is my own. This world is not my home, and I am untouchable.

1 comment:

Shea said...

Billions and billions of specks....