death won't be by my hands

i think that one day we might commit suicide without knowing it. draped in melancholy folds of dried blood and silk. dead to the world, suicide through death of the mind. death to individuality. nuke the thought. i watch people a lot. they move, but they don't know why. if you asked them why they work, they'd say that it's because they have to. they're obliged to. they're told to. and so many of them couldn't tell you who they are. never stopped to wonder. maybe never even had the wonder.

lost it as a child.

so instead they either soak themselves in waters of mock happiness, like video games or shopping extravaganzas or forced laughter. they seem to deceive themselves into thinking they're happy when they don't know what happiness means. and after this nothingness, this nonexistence, they continue to trudge along. and before we know it, the world is strewn with mobile corpses and breathing flesh, rendered braindead but automated.

because of it all, i think most people live dead and die dead. they probably live at some point, but not for long. fear drives them to kill whatever happiness they might contrive, to stab and extinguish the utopia that isn't right for them to have, because so much of the world doesn't seem to have it.

but i do believe that there are exceptions. i believe that immortality is more likely than heaven. we have experienced the extraordinary, we've watched their light flicker in ourselves. for the most part, we also voluntarily smudge out the light for fear of exile or departure from society and its values, fear of difference. but those men and women that told their society to go to hell, the ones that created the music of the devil and stole sight from god, are those that we know and aspire to.

the problem is that we aspire to begin with. how many of those extraordinary people do you really believe became extraordinary through imitation? it is because of their timelessness, the art that lives through centuries and riots and wars, that they are immortal.

the soul is held captive in the body. we tell ourselves that it's much too magnificent to extend past our flesh, that our bones are a cage to a wild animal. but what if the soul found an extension, a cable to hang onto, and it grew to be larger than our physical beings could express? that is immortality, that is what it means to live forever. to love the body while living and nourish the soul through it all, life and death and birth.

everything breathing must die. the body is fragile, and like any machine it cannot live forever. but the body is only a vessel for life, and just because the ship sinks doesn't mean all the cargo evaporates to sea.

so instead of concentrating on how we must die, on worrying about what we don't know, let's say to hell with it. let's live as if there is no tomorrow, and, better yet, as if there had never been.