We are all entitled to a certain measure of it. Not one of us is safe. For we each dole it out, and every person, color, and creed suffers it. The dismissal of this fact neglects history, reality, and the wherewithal to comprehend either.
But here’s the thing about it... it will strangle you in the warm and easy soak of assurance that it is well deserved. And it’s true. It is.
But it does not matter how legitimately entitled to it you may be. Revisited, it intensifies its only butcherous obsessions : guile and sabotage.
As you seek and find and claim every right to all of it that you merit, its appetite is commensurately increased. Its bitterness conjures new instances from a past of its own manufacture. It skews the history that once belonged to you that it may feed and live and grow upon its own irresistible contrivances.
It will, in time, kill all of you but the stale beat of your lifeless heart. And the only surviving freedoms left to the authentic self of your will, are to escape the plodding monotony of the flow of blood through your veins, or madness, or the languishing palpitation in each insipid thump of the dead thing in your chest until the end of your wasted life.
It is not hate. I led you wrong there. Hate is but one of many vigilant guards of your walls and bars and chains: your only defense against the siege of life.
And these champions, at your behest, sanction but a single and venerated and constant companion: the only thing you cling to close enough to shove the blade in slow enough for you to feel all of the pain most, without notice.
The murderer of your own soul is your own pain.
Abdication of your legitimate right to it is your only hope. For when you free it from your cage, so will you be.
But you alone must confront its most stalwart guardian: Yourself.
As published in The Boise Beat
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