It amuses me, sometimes, when people call me and my kind "monsters." I would like to remind you all that we are not bound by your petty and short-sided moral codes... and neither, it should be said, are you.
Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time there was a young woman, around 14 years of age. Her mother had come down with a strange disease, and died, slowly and painfully, before her daughter's eyes. The grief-stricken girl was sent to live with her father, a man she had not seen for 5 years. A man who had walked out on her mother, though they had never actually been divorced.
Far from offering the estranged child comfort, the father pushed her away. He barely spoke to her, and they barely saw each other. Every night, she heard him on the phone, speaking with social services, trying to give her away.
And she cried. Her mother was dead, her father didn't want her. What could she do?
Oh, but she was wrong. You see, there is another person in the story. Someone I think you may recognize. He saw the look in the father's eyes when he looked at her. He knew. Her father did want her, very, very badly. And that was precisely why he pushed her away-- he was afraid that he might lose control. That he might hurt her.
So one night, the girl found her feet moving on their own. She found that, dressed in hardly anything, she was walking to her father's room, unable to stop herself. Unable to do anything but watch, panic and confusion bubbling just under the surface, as she entered his room, climbed into his bed, and spoke words that were not hers.
Mid-coitus, she died, leaving a man in terror and guilt, his own daughter's naked and defiled corpse in his bed. He didn't understand what had happened, but he knew that he was responsible, and so he turned himself in.
Nobody treated him with kindness and pity. They called him names. Rapist. Murderer. Child molester. And he allowed them. As he saw it, it was no less than he deserved.
Oddly enough, he died in interrogation. Strange thing. There was no torture involved after all.
And the detective who was in the room with him? He died two months later, having just gotten into a confrontation with members of some new gang. A gang with a heavy religious bent.
And one of those thugs who supposedly killed him died a month afterward, in a shootout with... well, you know the rest of this story don't you?
Strange thing, guilt. I don't understand it, but it seems to infect mortals something fierce. If you are going to regret something later, why do you go through with it? It makes no sense.
We don't know we'll regret it, that's why we do it. Or we know we'll regret it, but we figure that it's worth a little regret. Like eating a burrito from a sketchy burrito stand - we know we're going to eject that fucker in a few hours, but in the moment it just tastes so good, that we'll accept the regret in exchange for the goodness of that moment.
ReplyDeleteI don't think you'll understand any of that, however, because you are not human. Just like I don't think we will understand anything you do. We're incompatible. We're incomprehensible to each other.