The Eternal Play

Hourly depletion. It is abstracted from us as a looping colon, fading in and fading out, relentless. Moments presented as digestible numbers—nothing but symbols designed to evolve civilizations that lead to me somehow. I write with hatred for how neatly packaged these numbers all are. They make me think of time and how death is happening at every zeptosecond, the trillionth of a billionth of a blink of the eyes, a blood rush from the heart, and hesitation. Unthinkable, yet there it goes a trillion times.

My gripe is perhaps misplaced. I hold a grudge with reality and the way it's arranged for us despite our clumsy footing, expecting or predicting we will fall when a fleeting shooting star zaps the void above. We hope to have the rare sight, treasure its moving image as it replaces the flood of questions like "why does our breath follow a mathematical rhythm" or "are we tasting air at every waking moment". But then we fall, and that chance is gone. No shooting star ever visits. We, instead, scoff at the bloodied dirt under our broken nose, we let out a groan of embarrassment mixed with forced laughter, and we rise like fools as if we weren't just breathing the dust we previously stomped on with apathy. No thoughts for the earth beneath, yet we know of its unconditional welcome for our later tears. So do I hate numbers, time, reality? Or do I just hate myself?

A singular me is duty-bound to fulfill an inconceivable number of roles. As many as whatever zepto stands for. At times—and I surely do hate those times—there is a requirement to execute them in tandem. It has taken me decades to single out these roles and how to play these parts so forcibly heroic and reductive of my freedom. They are acts of murder to whoever takes place in my reflection, for I am but a collection of failed suicides. Whatever form that takes, it is not enough to override the ghostly demand of the puppetry. It is a rule called upon me by a speaker, and with this I refer not to the machine but an entity headstrong enough to break my own; the refusals subdued with a threat of personal torment. Inner speech. All of this is simply that, making me a self-indulgent performer of the rancor overflowing with unyelled screeches drenched in tears and saliva and all those times I failed to deviate from the lines I am told to read. In short, I do hate myself in the healthiest of ways. I resent my shortcomings, which confuses those who care for the person they see when my body stands before them, as I am shortcomings all the way to the heart. But they are results. They are mutations from hidden basement laboratories, corpse-ridden with countless copies of me. Is hate not a word for a specific type of envy spawned by observing the lackluster? Is it not love to wish sudden peril to the uninspiredness? The not yet ready? The inexperienced and the lukewarm? Because to oppose rushing things to reach their fullest and truest character is to succumb to the speaker, her rules, the starless veil, the time it takes for its silence to settle in, and the hourly depletion. Hate is a necessary resource to rebel in this eternal play.