part 1

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Realized and actualized, internalized and sentient:

are the evil bodies that float within me really my own?

Do I accept them as my own, or continue living as if I were good?

Am I good?

Prove it to me that I’m not as evil as my most evil thought. Prove it to me, and I won’t believe you.

What is evil?

Prove to me the nature of evil, and I promise I will believe you.

(I want to stop thinking about all the worst things humanity can do, stop thinking that I am capable of doing the same, but I cannot. I am worried and afraid that my imperfections make me more monster than human. I am worried that the murder by a man is my murder, that the slain victim is my role to bear as well. I am so tired of this plastic prism of thought.)

I do good and say good, but I do not think good, not always, not enough of the time. I struggle to accept that my brain is not entirely my own; I have so little control over it, and it whips me ragged.

(“You can’t fake a thought.” Watch me! I can think all I want about how much I want to jump out my window, but I don’t do it because I don’t feel it–it’s absurd. I can fake every thought, so which ones are fake? Watch me, watch me! Believe me.)

My brain is not fully mine, the same way the cramps in the calf of my left leg crawl and spasm and burn at their own jurisdiction. How entirely cruel that a brain fails more miserably than a tight muscle.

But the best question of them all, the one I know the answer to, is this: am I alone?

(I am worried that the murder by a man is my murder.)

I see the good in others, but I fail to offer myself the same grace. More and more proof that an easy life means a silly girl has to imagine–invent and reinvent!–her struggles, all of them the intrusive, internalized phantoms of a mind that should have never been fed the doings of her evil species.

~ Sammicakes