Weariness

Weariness like millions of microscopic leeches coursing through my veins, sucking their matrix in its channels. Earnest emotional appeals made to the narcissist who holds the blade to my throat. . .

"You bear the blame for your state," my ex-wife tells me as she waxes crocodilianly lachrymose. Hers the ersatz melancholy; mine the true. The melancholy of he who has had the burdensome cross of penetrative lucidity thrust on his already sagging shoulders.

One day she will look to me, in secret moments, to impart the fruits of such terrible vision to her. She will want solace, and thus she will seek to purchase cheaply that which came to me so dearly.

"Who," I ask her, "do you think imparts such vision to the benighted, the confused and flailing? It is those like Dostoevsky, the epileptic and compulsive gambler, who was taken before the firing squad only to be granted a reprieve as he stood blindfolded, terror-stricken, listening to the fateful drumroll; who, in the face of abyssal mortality, made the move of resignation, and slumped against the pole in weariness--unfathomably deep weariness.

"It is those like me, who lashed neck to crossbeam in order to wring the burden of sight from me precisely because it brought me such weariness--unfathomably deep weariness."

Lucidity, I have come to learn, remains inadequate until it is brought to confront and accept its own annihilation. Only after this can the lucid one grant his gift to the benighted as he endures that peculiar "no-time" that those who should be dead, but are in fact not, find themselves in. This "no-time" is the time to harvest the ebon pearls of weary wisdom.