Suppose she doesn’t know what she wants. But in the end, who really knows what they want, anyway?
Is that even the right question, or is it ... is it question of what she needs? Oh, that makes it all better, doesn’t it? It’s tough to know what one wants, but it’s really damn near impossible to differentiate between that category and what one needs.
The mirror yields an unsatisfactory image; she is not at all pleased with what she sees. It’s not enough. Perhaps if there was more ... if it was all just a little bit better ... then maybe, maybe, it would all fall into place. Maybe then, she’ll be satisfied. Perhaps if there was just a little bit more of it, then that gnawing hunger would disappear, shrink tinier and tinier until it became evanescent into mist.
But will that fix anything, she wonders? Will it fill the empty void that stares back at her from the hollow caverns of those eyes so pitifully empty and yet at the same time, clouded with a raging fury of emotion and things best hidden from the world?
Hate is hard. Happiness is a rare thing; joy is a true gem, but hate is more difficult a feeling for a person to achieve. Because with hate, one needs to have a purpose: there is a craving, a desperate, primal battle for control over one’s mind and soul as the dark feeling consumes, eating up all that is worth living for like a starved leech sucking out all the bittersweet remnants of life away forever.
If hate is hard, then apathy is unknowable. Apathy, the lack of any particular thought, the lack of anything, of everything ... Human beings are made to live and feel with every fiber of their rather frail skeletal frame covered with the canvas of many colors that they call skin. A canvas indeed, for how can it be otherwise described? Whites, reds, yellows, blacks, and browns ... the myriad hues that constitute the human race, making each and every feeling person who they are. Making them beautiful. They do not lack, because they cannot. However, it is strange because apathy is the one particular hurdle that she found the easiest to cross.
But then suppose apathy has dominated all she knows (and has ever known?), does that mean that she is then actually not in want or need of anything? She doesn’t know what she wants ... she doesn’t know what she needs. She doesn’t know anything at all. Or does she?
Does she realize that raw scrape of that something inside of her; does she realize it? Perhaps not. But there is always tomorrow.
Until then ...
Until then she can be patient, because she has always been told that patience is a virtue. Patiently she will sit in her apathy; patiently she will watch the seconds, the minutes, the hours, the days, the very moments of her life slip by. But she can sit oh-so-still, can’t you see? She can sit so still that they won’t even notice she’s there. So still that sometimes she even forgets herself.
The precious, precious moments glide past her, a tantalizing dream, and a whisper of invitation. But suppose she doesn’t know what she wants.
Socrates, thought by some to be the wisest man in the world, once stood among his peers and unabashedly proclaimed, “I know nothing.”
Apathy. Uncertainty. Which one is the lesser evil? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know ...
Do you?
