Positively Glorious!

You sleep like shit. This is more due to the bottle of cheap wine and resultant headache than to any thoughts or dreams you may or may not have had during the night. When the alarm goes off you feel like you want to cry, then you remember that you have much darker things to cry about than a hangover, so you hit the alarm and crawl out of bed.

Awakened and like a zombie you go though the routines of a normal morning. Your wife– silent, attentive, saddened in her own ways– makes breakfast and coffee, placing them before you quietly, gently. You’re sure they taste good, but have no real indication of the truth of that because the only color you have in your mouth is a dull gray.

Then you look up at the clouds, you think about color, and you begin to cry.

The truth is this: everything is gray. The sky, your breakfast, your wife’s very skin. Some part of the world is lost. You don’t know what color to think in, and that hurts you. So you cry, then you stop, then you lay your head on your wife’s shoulder and you cry some more. Thoughts crash against the front of your skull like waves in a tempest of questions.

How can you mourn someone you hated?

How can you hate someone you loved?

How can you love someone you never really liked?

The questions come in the voice of the taunting jester, and in asking them you’re forced to question yourself. The jester’s voice dances around the bush, never quite getting to the main point, the crux– but you know it’s there.

If your mother dies alone, how can you really love anyone?

Do you love anyone?

Is gray the color of evil?

How can so much emotion fit in your head without bursting it open?

It can’t all fit. You’re head is going to burst. So you lift your zombie body, put on your zombie coat, and go to your zombie job. There, you are surrounded by other zombies who hate their job as much as you do, all working for a zombie boss… who hates his job as much as you do.

You don’t actually know why you’re going to work, unless it’s for the hope that zombie world can deaden everything for a few hours. But it doesn’t. Not really. The quiet office, the hum of the computer, the mindlessness. All serve to provide you with an environment seemingly designed to give you just enough space to stare at that blank wall and contemplate seriously what an awful, evil, black-hearted person you are.

If your mother dies alone… how much evil can you live with?

And then your eyes shift, and you glance at the desk, where two casually dropped pens are lying across each other on a piece of white paper. You stare for a moment, suddenly remembering being 6 or 7 years old and visiting the doctor in the white building. He said you were there because you spent 2 months straight drawing nothing but crosses. Every spare moment of the day. Big ones, small ones, crosses inside crosses. You have notebooks full of crosses. “Your mother is very worried about you,” the doctor says.

“Why did you draw so many crosses?” He asked, and you know you can’t lie. You told everyone else that you were doing it because you were going to draw the perfect cross, because you love crosses more than anything. But that was a lie. For protection. This man is a doctor. He’ll know that you’re lying. And if you lie to a doctor, you get a needle stuck in you, a big needle, big as your arm, stuck right into your stomach– every kid in The Projects knows that. So you opted for the truth.

“For my mom,” you said. “She cries a lot, and she talks about God all the time.” And then you started to cry, much like you are crying right now. You started to cry, and you said “I don’t know how to make her happy, so I draw crosses for her. I just want to make her happy.”

After a few minutes you pull it together, wipe off your keyboard and you get back to work. You bill your weak emotional breakdown to the client, as any good zombie cry baby would do.

After what feels like 75 hours, you shuffle home to watch movies. You have now spent more time in front of the television during the past two days than you have during entire months previously. You now know why some people spend there lives there. They are escaping from things too big to think of– or at least they’re trying to.

Your mother watched a great deal of television.

At least you think she did.

But, then again, what the hell do evil people know about the lives of others.

After two movies, you crawl in bed where you quietly feed the monster your tears while trying not to wake the only comfort you have. While questioning why she is there at all. The tempest crashes in your head, and the questions are real, and you know the answers, even though you don’t want to say them out loud.

Is it your fault that your mother died, alone?

Yes, of course it is.

Staring off into the distance of your darkened room, you look into the black face of the monster and are not as scared as you were the night before. This night, you know that you don’t have to fear the monster. You don’t have to fear it because your heart is blacker than the monster’s. Your heart is as black as coal.

Maybe it’s even blacker than that.