Seive

What I fear the most is my life catching up to me, nipping at my
heels and causing me to stumble and fall headlong into melancholy. I
have a strong inclination it's what everyone fears to some extent. No
one wants to fess up to mistakes, face the wrath of the past.
Unfortunately, it's a rite that everyone must take. No one chooses it;
it just sneaks up on you when you least expect it. And now, all my
fears have come to pass.

What once existed - me -- no longer does. Yes, I am alive, but that's
hardly anything to be proud of. To exist, one must feel alive, and
lately, I have felt everything but. I've felt sadness, gloom, laughter,
joy, fear, impatience; some would say that qualifies for living. To me,
it seems there should be so much more than mere feeling. If there
isn't, I feel cheated. Does that make me exist? I can hardly bear it
any longer.

I wish I were existentialist. Then I could truly be alone, feel safe
and secure in my solitude. Unfortunately, I live through and for
others. I am a vicarious anti-hero. I live my hopes and dreams out
through what others perceive me to be. I am certifiably worthless, but
only until I graduate with honors. It's a forlorn philosophy, but one I
have to live with, if only because it exists within me.

I really don't believe that anything I do, say, write, breathe or mean
will ever hold water in the overall spectrum of the great light. The
world is a sieve, and beneath the world are its occupants, ready to
drink the falling drops. They'll never mean anything, though, because
each individual assumes they thought of it first. They will only learn
the truth of their ideas by first acting in a manner that completely
violates any semblance of logic. We are a race of hindsight, of regret.
We all want a time machine, just for that one instant where we fucked
it all up, but we don't realize that even if we do get that moment
back, embrace it and rectify it, we'll just end up destroying something
else along the way. By the time we realize that our theories are fact,
they will have fallen through the grate, irretrievable. The sewers of
the mind are a vilified, full of alligators and murderers; dream
annihilators.

So we live our lives above ground, because we cannot bear to force
ourselves any deeper. We fear alligators. We loathe murderers. We're
also fascinated. We are captivated by things we fear, but not as a
defense mechanism, rather, as a demented desire to become those things.
A simple slip of a gene is the difference between an alligator and a
killer; it's so close, we sometimes cannot tell them apart.

A little girl is found mutilated in a swamp. Her bloody, tattered body
lies limp, mud-soaked, half submerged in the water. Her legs have been
broken. Her face is indistinguishable. Her flesh is mangled. She is
dead. Next to her is her favorite doll, in a similar state. Was it an
alligator? This is a swamp, after all. Though it is also the perfect
place for a murder. No one hears you scream when you're choking on
seaweed.

When was it that we decided to tell stories to scare our children? What
drove us to make them fear the innocent? Should they fear alligators,
or simply learn to respect them? Should they fear their parents, or
simply learn to respect them? What is so scary about the dark? Is it
what hides in it? Or is it the fear of the unknown, that we are
conditioned to be afraid of things we cannot see? If that is the case,
we should always be afraid, because we are unable - or unwilling -- to
see within ourselves.

The inner child is often very afraid of the stories we've told it over
the years. It's very dark inside, so naturally, it's the perfect
incubator. Sadly, the light of things will only expound the issues that
have been seeded. It's too much to handle at once. That is why I abhor
it. I dread that light hitting my eyes for the first time, because they
have been trained to be blind for so long, to look in the other
direction. I have eyestrain from staring so long. My mother used to
tell me that if you crossed your eyes, they would stick. Just another
drop in the sieve, I suppose. Who am I to listen? All I can do is hear.
That's not nearly enough to justify existence. I am full of holes,
leaks and drips. A filter for the next fool.