Exeunt.

 26 September, 2014

You almost got everything right.

You were right about the acting. A certain comedian called Robin Williams figured it out long ago: a grimace can be a grin if it has a good PR department. Let me tell you something: some time back, way before all this, I was in love. I thought that our love would overcome everything. Amor vincit omnia. I turned out to be wrong. At some point along the way, I developed the delusion that laughter equals love and I abused it like a drug. Every snicker, every giggle, every chuckle, was a quiet affirmation of my existence: This person wouldn't be laughing if I wasn't here. I must be important. The thing about the stage? Every time you put on that mask, you get to be the person you don't have the guts to be when you're off. You get to be the person that people love, that people cheer on, that people want. For a brief, narcotic moment, you can feel like you're wanted. And then I found the courage to love again, to yearn for another human being who love in return is a thousand, a million, a billion audiences. I found the courage to trust in humanity, to believe that maybe this time, amor will really vincit omnia. I turned out to be wrong, again. Two points make a hypothesis; I'm not looking for the third to prove the theory. Now the drugs don't work, because the trick isn't magical when you can see the trapdoor.

You were right about the black hole. It's funny you used that metaphor, because another name for a black hole is a singularity. Nothing but an infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense bit of matter, spinning around and around itself, letting things in but not letting things out, drifting along through the universe and ripping apart anything and everything it comes into contact with. Like I said, an apt metaphor. But if a black hole could think. If a black hole and an endocrine system and a hypothalamus and glands and emotions and higher-order thought. If a black hole could think and feel. Would it keep wandering through the cosmos, tearing apart all that is bright and stellar and stable? Or would it drift to its own corner of the universe, afraid at its own destructive power, and keep away from all other matters in fear of hurting them.

You were right about the conviction. You believe that you are right, and you are sure because nothing could have convinced me that I was wrong. The funny thing about the human mind is that, for some reason, it has to know its place in existence. Throughout history, we have been telling ourselves stories: we used to tell ourselves stories about gods; now we tell ourselves stories about atoms. We tell ourselves stories to reassure our brain that it knows where it is, because that is how we understand the world. But there is a difference between drawing yourself on a map, and drawing a map around yourself. We all tell ourselves stories; even this story I am telling myself is a story. I know that there is no way of getting out of that. But there are no answers to be had here. So I'm going somewhere where there are.


You almost got everything right. But you got two things wrong. One, you said I didn't leave behind a long letter. And two, you can't get guns in this country. But I do live on the seventeenth floor, and the windows have no grilles.
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...bang.