Mar 28, 2011 00:23
is a bit like the lonely sound of echoing laughter as you walk home from work at night, accompanied by the even lonelier feeling that somehow, it's at you.
It's a longing for the days of high school, or the jungle, or the precambrian ocean, where your survival was dependent on a status structure that was mathematical in its purity.
You see a praying mantis fighting as it's overtaken by a legion of army ants, and you ARE the praying mantis, dying despite its piercing, descending limbs and gnashing carnivorous jaws, the same way you ARE every ant disappearing into them until the assault is complete.
It's when your fellow employees learn to coddle you with a sort of gentle condescension, and it makes you feel so grateful.
It's the understanding that cloaked lepers who rang bells as they walked down the streets calling "unclean" did so not out of concession to the law, but as an apology.
It's the feeling that a dead body has risen bloated from deep water, and now you've awoken inside it.
It's the dream where you find yourself at school, naked. It's that dream and worse; it's the ones that follow you into the day like grinning specters, disfiguring the real world into something cold and cavernous. And you shudder to rid yourself of them, and once they're gone you deny that they were ever there; and if the memory ever returns you flinch away from it, like some unseeable thing that licks against your leg in the shallows of a murky lake.
You know your outsides are just as ugly as your insides, and neither can ever be sufficiently hidden. When the alarm clock screams just like you want to, you know that you are going to have to face these people anyway.
It's a feeling that can only be quelled by reassuring yourself that ultimately, you WILL be forgotten. It does not occur to you that the way to make the feeling go away completely is to forget, because that is impossible. So you remember the ones who love you, who came to admire you when they looked on you and somehow saw beauty.
But even more importantly, you remember the freaks, the nerds, the lepers, the stillborn and surviving cripples. You remember them and love them fiercely, and you tell yourself that this feeling is as beautiful as they are, because IT is what allows you to be called one of THEM.
It's like when Van Gogh said, "The ugly may be beautiful- the pretty, never."