trust issues

I sacrificed some hours and some misery in the name of a smile tonight, talking about and talking through life with someone I’ve come to consider my best friend.

What an insane title: ‘best friend.’ It’s one *hell* of a thing to say about someone else, and so pregnant with respect and value, but the only people who thought to come up with and use that label are people who have to forcefully divide a kelp from the chaff and detritus that is their social circle, and give them a title because their splendor isn’t visible enough without it.

Things that are, are what they are. But either way, there it is, I talked with my best friend tonight. He’s the one that got me reading this Watchmen book, a story I’m still enraptured by and struggling with. I tried to describe to him what I’m trying to do with my life, and with my writing, and my living, and my teaching, and I think I did a poor job with it.

When exploring the psychological profile of one of the characters of the book, the book reprints a fictional article that this character published, talking about ornithology, the study of birds, and his fixation with owls. He describes the process of the owl’s hunt, the isolation of the bird, the mad, insane screams into the night, the wide-open eyes reading the darkness like a menu, dropping silently into the lives of the other animals and then making his mark with an unholy noise and a talon to the throat. This is what I am, this is my hunting call, my impact, and my splash, and my crazed, unreasonable choice I make.

But I no longer land my talons upon any sort of prey. I simply soar, and I hunt, and I catch… and release. I paralyze with my hoarse death-call, just to remind the field mice that death follows them; so live while you can, little mice.

My talons only tense when you doubt. When you struggle and dare. And grip harder as you fight. But my secret is plain to see, from anyone who reads my words, and from my best friend who understands me and remains unflappable in the face of my plumage and my battle-cries… I will not kill.

I just need you to understand that if it wasn’t me, practicing my hunt on you and reminding you to defend yourself, it would be someone else, who isn’t so generous with his strength, who isn’t so fair, and doesn’t consider the other side of the deal, the prey’s perspective. If it wasn’t me, that hunts you, it would be someone who doesn’t believe in you, who doesn’t respect your potential, and who will take you, thrashing about, into the night, never to wonder again what you might have become.

Nasty, brutish, and short. Even if all I accomplish is to numb you lot to the war-cry and fear, you’ve at least come to understand that you cannot live in fear, and delusion, and decadence, and comfort… and by default, must simply learn to live.

And they’ll hate me for it, my friend. They always do, in one way or another; I breed resentment, always, in the end. But nothing ever ends, this is what I understand where they don’t. They hate me in the end, and I count that as their beginning.

~ D

~ by drizitche on March 11, 2009.