Unfamiliar

The door was unremarkable and yet as he closed it on the world it was his shield. It was the final element of the fourth wall that encased him in the novelty of safety. Even so, he did not dare to breath freely. He noted this as he would note the library of knowledge that he now had access to by virtue of the choice he had now at last executed. The tightening of his chest as though he were bound tightly was a reality he had been oblivious to until now.

The enormity of his decision weighed heavily upon half of him. A choice that was a lifetime in the making, he knew he would always struggle with the meanings that swarmed around his escape. That he’d given up was a truth of sorts. That was the nature of sacrifice. But the act of sacrifice alone was not the point. This was the initiation of something new. 

Out there in what he called the Vanilla World, leaving a job was not seen as giving up just as long as you had a job to go to. It helped if the new role was bigger and better. More pay was a glib indicator of progression and allowed a person to be disingenuous as they spoke of how it wasn’t about the money. Easily said when the matter of money had been addressed such that more savoury and honourable concepts could be bandied about. Money and the sale of life was the presiding paradigm however it may be painted.

He could tell himself that he’d fled from the lie. And that the lie had propagated an ocean of lies on a conveyor belt that he’d powered with every step he took in that former life of his. Eventually he’d attended to the feeling that this existence generated within him and little by little he understood that he was drowning. This was not an environment meant for the living and as he began to glimpse the truth of it, it terrified him with the madness of it all. A madness he’d consumed and was now consuming him.

Insanity demands silence and it is obliged a thousand times over and more. The weak appease the projection of strength that madness successfully fakes. This he knew because no one ever spoke out against the nonsensical, and for him to attempt the articulation of the obvious would be to damn himself irrevocably. It wasn’t just that no one would listen. They would hear him well enough, their survival was dependent on hypervigilance. That part of them that defended the way of things would detect his heresy. That part of them that had already died as a necessary tithe to the status quo. That craven zombie would rise up against him and he would be crushed by the harbingers of the lie. 

In order to survive, humanity had a simple embedded plan; protect the familiar. This had worked for thousands of years. The proof of the success of this strategy was that humanity continued to exist. Speaking out against familiarity was a death sentence however well-intentioned the motives. Jesus had proven this point and not much had changed in the two thousand years since he’d encouraged people to be kind to each other and been murdered for his challenge of the familiar.

Whether silence was the biggest lie or the oxygen the lie breathed, he did not know. Thoughts intrigued and amused him. Thoughts were labels and signs. Vestiges of meaning that suggested that some thinking could be partaken of. Thinking was utterly different to thoughts. That he’d had to think this one through quite recently told him much and more of his nature and the nature of those around him. 

Everyone was broken. They came into the world whole and the familiar broke them in. The familiar was an assault course that taught the clumsiest of survival strategies. No one had a choice in this. For a helpless babe the message of this world was crystal clear – conform or die. No one cared who the baby was. That was never the point. The comfort of the familiar trumped all, and in that space care was a performative means to the familiar’s end. 

He'd wanted more than the strategy of conformity and in the frustration of his lack he’d tried harder and harder to be more. The more he was the more obvious the lack was and so he eventually focused on what may be missing. Attempting to diagnose the fault in the machine. He needed to know why the engine of him wasn’t connecting to the wheels of life to drive him to his desired destination. Why he could hold a hand and yet he could never hold a heart. Not even his own.

The search for meaning was long and arduous. He looked all around him and in so doing he saw himself more and more. At some point he dropped useless value judgements. Which was to say that he began to undo some of the conditioning that he’d been subjected to. Everything did not require sorting into either good or bad. Many things just were. And so, did it matter whether he liked what he saw when he looked upon himself? What did that change? Establishing the need for change should surely be based upon something more substantial than like or a snap judgement of good or bad that had no reliable referent point.

He was the only reliable benchmark he had, and he was moving and changing with the current of the river and breath of the winds. Establishing the essence of him was no easy task and he doubted he would ever attain a satisfactory explanation for who he actually was. He was not his job. And he certainly wasn’t his role as sibling, son or husband. Even if he had been exemplary in the execution of these aspects of his life they could not define him. 

Maybe he was one of the elements of this world that just was. Neither good nor bad. A grain of the infinite that was currently experiencing the universe in order for it to know itself that bit more. 

That he was unique was beyond doubt. And yet it was quite possible that he could squander himself in the pursuit of the familiar. He could embrace an existence that gave up all that he was and all that he was meant to be in the comparative safety of a crowd that had absolutely no interest in ever knowing him. 

He’d struggled with the notion of love all his life. Love was one of the fundamental lies of the familiar. The feral cunning that had appropriated love and used it as both defence and attack was, as far as he could discern, unbeatable. The familiar was a lose-lose race to a place of damnation. There was no winning in this game. This was the Great Trick and the devil was in the detail. Complexity baffled and few would apply themselves to unwrapping layer after layer of concealment in order to see what their gift really was.

Because they were scared and they’d been taught to be scared from the off. Safer to stick with what they knew than to expose the truth of themselves and find that there was nothing of worth there. This fear was another defence of the familiar. The wounded and fearful lashed out against anything that they perceived to be a threat. A lost army marching into the darkness.

Love in this cauldron of lies and fear was nothing like the real deal. A pale imitation that hid the lies. What people learned to call love was trauma. People were bonded into servitude via fear and pain. This lie took centre stage and enjoyed standing ovations. The drug of choice caused the gut to scream dire warnings and people called this butterflies. A beautiful lie heralding a lifetimes of hurt. 

Division was not love. Conflict was not love. Love was peace. Love was not a feeling. Love was a way of being and of doing. Love was the real and only religion, however it may be dressed up in words. 

He smiled to himself as he eyed his hand against the door that stood between him and the world he had chosen to step away from. Reminded himself that he was not leaving it all behind. That was an impossibility. He was a part of it and it was a part of him. They needed each other now more than ever.

But now it would be on his terms. 

He could choose and he would choose. This was the initiation of a choice that formalised a way of seeing and being that would allow him to love and in loving he would embrace the love that had awaited him from the very outset of this great adventure called life.

Love was in all things and he was one of those things. The connection he had sought was there all along. He had been trying to forge a false connection and gotten caught up in a crazy game of control where he had no such control.

But I love you.

His intent had been pure. The way he’d gone about things had been brutally wrong. He’d followed the examples set for him and things hadn’t worked out. They could never work out. He’d sought out alternative examples and tried again. He’d gone again and again until he realised that nothing was working and when he had accepted that failure, he saw that he’d never changed a thing other than the clothes he wore. 

In the aftermath of his latest failure to love sufficiently he’d decided that enough was enough. This did not mean that he would cease trying. He did not intend to cease to be. There were those he knew who spoke of walling up their hearts so that no one could ever hurt them again. He pitied that withdrawal. That was a waste of the opportunity to live. At the same time he respected the cessation of actions that had led to nothing but hurt. The moth had at last regrouped and stopped bothering with lightbulbs.

As he attempted to recover from the bout of hurt he’d recently experienced, he battled with language and its meaning. Realising he’d been seduced by the attributed meaning all around him. Spoon fed the soup of culture that included books and film. Suckled at the romance of life that was supposed to softened harsh realities. 

He began with the meaning of love and stuck with the working theory that this was not love. He dared to question the fundamentals of his life. Soon enough he encountered the recurrent excuse; they didn’t mean it.Answers lay in what was meant, not a retrospective big reveal of meaningless. Yet another gap where there should instead be connection.

He warred with his victimhood. All his life he’d refused to be a victim and in this avoidance he’d made of himself a larger target for victimisation. He questioned the binary nature of that relationship. Yes, he’d suffered abuse, but he refused to discard his agency. And he had to hear out the pleas from abusers that included their appropriation of victimhood, more so in the most clear cut acts of abuse.

Acceptance allowed him to see further and therefore see more. This was real forgiveness. Forgiveness was a powerful tool that afforded a strange calm and a promise of peace if he would continue to allow the world to be the way that it was, as opposed to painting it as something that he wanted it to be and so failing to ever relate to it adequately.

There were words that carried with them a weight of meaning that bowled him over like a dumb skittle. He began to engage with the quotes and sayings that made little sense to him and in so doing called out more of his laziness. There was a strength here for him to acquire in doing so.

If you love someone, let them go.

He’d dismissed and rejected this advice as nonsensical. Editing his worldview to suit his ignorance. Failing to do his homework and expecting to pass the test regardless. Detachment went against everything he’d been indoctrinated into. Belonging was all. Find the team and the group and grasp a hold of the familiar in a death grip so you’re still clutching at it as you’re lowered into the ground.

They even preferred to call detachment non-attachment due to the violent reaction caused in many as they were introduced to the d-word. Once he’d calmed down and reassured himself that no one was going to die if he gave a word’s meaning a fair hearing, he lived all the more. To detach was to love freely. To accept things for all that they were and in loving them share the inherent joy that had always been there for him. Love lying in wait to ambush the calm and vulnerable with happiness.

As he stood in the room that was a part of his new home, he considered the outlandish quality of his vulnerability. He had come into this world in the most helpless of states and at no point had he become invulnerable. As he’d awoken to the shame of his nakedness and shrouded himself in clothing, he’d also steeped himself in untruths in an insane attempt to defend himself from his very nature. That in itself was a madness. To convince himself that he was not vulnerable and attack anyone who reminded him of his vulnerable nature.

Fear of vulnerability went beyond the rejection of mortality. Death was an altered state that would conclude all life. Another fact denied in order to blight the short passage of life. There was no gratitude in the rejection of either death or vulnerability and in this lack there could be no love. Life became a sentence that was punctuated with death.

And so he closed the door on the madness of being that had been imposed upon him from birth. In his vulnerability he had dared to question the beliefs he had been steeped in and he opened himself up to the all the possibilities and meanings that the infinite contained. Risked everything he had clutched onto so desperately and allowed this flavour to wash away in the currents of life itself. 

This was the only way he could heal. Letting go of everything in order to finally understand why his rigidity, his unwillingness to bend in the breeze, had caused him so much pain and strife. 

The why of his pain reached well beyond the most recent instance of what he had at first viewed as misfortune. A cuckoo had slipped into his nest and secretly jostled pieces of him from his nest whilst playing the role of the familiar more perfectly than a genuine person could be themselves. A silver screen that he’d tuned into as bit by bit the cuckoo had dropped him out. Seeing this for what it really was had cut him deeper than he knew was possible. Then he’d had to grasp the poisoned dagger that lay deep in his heart with both hands and cut himself into ribbons as he extracted a lie that was intended to kill.

He'd carried this wound from childhood and as he became familiar with his originating wounds he saw why it was he’d sought people out who were certain to open up those self-same injuries and hurt him all over again.

That was what he’d been taught he deserved. 

They told him they loved him as they did anything but love him and he accepted the punishment for sins that he’d been gifted by those who constantly professed their love for him. A legacy of the ages. Family heirlooms passed down and down and down.

He did not blame them. He understood that he could not blame them. Instead, he pitied them the choices they’d been coerced into making and the poisoned fruit that had grown from repeating those choices throughout their lives. Choices they believed were the only choices they could make. Choices they convinced themselves they weren’t making. Doing nothing on their watch in order to perpetuate the familiarity of harm and pain.

Once he began to see it, he could no longer be a part of it. This was not living and it was not for him. He had broken the bad contract and he could no longer afford to be complicit in the harm of others in order to secure a false security for himself and those he loved. He could not swallow down the lie of him doing no harm as the devil sat beside him on the fence of his indecision and laughed at his approaching damnation.

Now the door was closed he would start again. See if he couldn’t find out who he was and who he was always meant to be. He was truly grateful for everything he’d experienced. That would always be a part of him and it had brought him to the bridge that he always had to cross so he could devote himself to the task of loving. And in the quest of this life he knew he would find beacons of hope and peace. That he had already encountered flames of true love throughout the existence he’d once thought was living filled him with hope. He felt his heart grow in his chest for all that was to come. He’d arrived. This would be his home. And from here he would venture out into the world and create memories that were the true measure of a life well lived. Memories that flowed through the lifeblood of loving connection.