The Monologue

Posted by Gino Bjorn on Aug 29, '08 2:38 PM for everyone

For my brothers and the people I love and loved

There is no convenience in truth…

               

                It all started when I was 9… Then it happened again when I was 14, and again when I was 24. Details of such events are not important, but they all share one thing. Each of these events spurred heartbreaks. Every single occasion left a needle in one of my ventricles, and has caused my heart to pump poisoned blood in my system. Grudges, disappointments, failures... Call it however you fancy but they were all built of one thing; they were all catalysts for depression.  And those milestones, nay, roadblocks forced me to take a foreign step, an easier path in the crossroad. These paths however commanded me to leave a portion of myself at the fork: my innocence, my judgment, my truth. I was made to carry on in each journey a fraction of the person I was before with battle scars in my chest, and I did this willingly to shelter my self from even more of these “heartbreaks”… I settled for acceptance and the world as perceived and dictated by the world.

For a while now, I am stuck in this perpetual limbo. A status I’ve created for other’s benefit, a social lie. I am not an honest person… I’ve lied constantly for comfort or to avoid confrontations. I ducked on battles with deception, with a poker face and a poker heart. I’ve lied to the people I love, to the people I care about and to the people I pretended I never cared about. I’ve lied in my tastes, my pleasures, my knacks, and my peeves. I’ve lied so compulsively that I managed to create a force field against truth, for “I can’t handle the truth!!!” (A Few Good Men). I have lied to all… including to myself. For in lies I found convenience.

Truth has been the most worthy adversary and against it I have exhibited a great display of cowardice. I am a coward. That is the bravest thing I could admit… I’ve been hiding beneath the cloak of acceptance all my “socially-aware” life… And in the few instances that I did not, I’ve meekly blamed on youth and influence. I’m afraid of disclosure, afraid of casting pearls or rubbles, afraid of eyes and voices. My life is a communal gathering of my environment’s pleasures… I became a train fueled by appreciation and acknowledgements; a jukebox that functions on others’ loose change. I was built to please, though most of the time I have failed miserably that purpose. I am a cab driver; led by instructions and when I’m not I fumblingly look for people to give me one. I am a piece of a jigsaw puzzle and not a portrait; a manifestation and not a creation.

Time got older and my chances of gaining courage to face adversities with complete self-respect have dwindled, every attempt to surf against became an uphill task. I’ve already made promises and have bound myself to rules. I’ve made relationships, and broken a few… I’ve made enough love and furnished enough wars. I’ve made opinions I cannot take back. I am made responsible, and I was made an adult. It is a decision, yes, but a decision that is purposely made inevitable. I am 25, and will never be younger… I must grow up… But I never realized that growing into an “adult” requires you to shed your skin, your nature, and your conceived truth. I never thought you have to stop living, or to live another way other than what is innate. We were all made to live collectively in a manufactured Life. It’s cruel that the world demands this much, but it found ways to candy-coat the situation. The world came up with words like “harmony” and “cooperation”… and even words like “maturity”… Like it is a switch that can be turned on at will. Age made it hard to retrieve whatever was left on the fork, the damage has been done and life, it seems, is a one way street. But my ego, myself demands for me to counter flow if not restart the whole journey. Not to correct what was done but to commence anew.

Redemption… I don’t want it. I want something more, something that doesn’t brand a permanent scar to my already scarred epidermis of existence. Redemption is in fact a very lonely word… It could only mean that you have let down yourself in an unforgivable way and you take petty chances at diminishing guilt of letting so. You take a soiled rug to wipe off dirt in your face, your body, your spirit… and in doing so, you mar yourself with an illusion of cleanliness; an illusion of grandeur and of self-forgiveness. It is a glorified disappointment covered up with an even more glorified lie. I don’t want that illusion… I don’t want redemption… I don’t want battle scars… I want a clean sheet of paper to write fragments that should’ve been written, should have been sung, and should have been realized. In a sense, I want to die in order to live again; A rebirth. We don’t write pieces over grubby ideas; we tear these pages off and carry on.  I want a new morning, not a different one.

This is a suicide note if you put it in a perspective. No! Spare me from spiritual clichés… I don’t want to hear your version of the truth. For the first time, I’m claiming the right to my own. And no, this is not an emotional outburst, this is a logical explosion. You should know by now that I don’t mean to kill myself… I mean the contrary… I mean to kill the version of myself I have manufactured all these years; to die in order to live again. It may take time, or it may never happen at all. But I am full fledged with this intention. I want to be reborn able and capable of loving what I love (borrowed from my brother, Fino). I want to be born with a heart free from phantom hands. I want to rise like a burning phoenix above the ashes, fiery with fervor for the truth. I want a renaissance free from corruption. For only in that way I would be able to liberate myself from the guilt -- the guilt of sticking with my conveniences, the guilt of embracing mediocrity, the guilt of not loving myself enough.