( :: definition :: )

I gave you everything. I gave you myself, my whole self, so that you might exist. I gave you the most simple of intelligences, the power to sense me; and in an act of elegant charity, I gave you the capacities by which to harness me. It seems I’ve been played for a fool.

In the beginning, you might even have been grateful. You understood the nature of our relationship, my totality and your total dependence. In return, you regarded me as sacred, you worshipped me. You offered me gifts, built pyres on my behalf; your monuments’ collective purposes: to be closer to me. I was pleased, and so shined upon you with grace. Oh, how things have changed.

These days, you take me for granted. If there is a single concept you hold as absolute, it is that I am reliable, & you’re right. I am, by my very definition, reliable. Any line I draw will extend beyond all eternities. But I must draw a new line now; this one is finite, and this one you have crossed repeatedly.

You cannot say I haven’t been patient. I have let you appropriate me in every way you’ve considered, every way I can tolerate. I have let you use me to construct an identity of your own. I have let you use me to discover the identities of others. I have given you colors, so that you could know emotion. I am responsible for everything you associate with “individuality” (As if a body could ever be unique!). I have let you bend me, diffuse me, focus me. I have let you fuse me, fiss me, –fract me, in any way you wish. When your world turns its back on me, I have even let you fabricate me. & What has come of it?

Stories. You use me, only to exhaust your own self-center. You discovered (all on your own, for once!) a way to communicate amongst your own imagined egos. Later, you learned how to print, how to preserve these delusions. Later still, you found a way to catch me: first in still frames, then through optical manipulation, you simulated my movement. Oh, how your revolution romanticizes your narcissism! Look closely at these records, and see that I am not there. They are hardly palimpsests; hollow testaments of my occupation. To call them representations would be a gross exaggeration.

This is your sole contribution: Love. You used me in its conception, in its invention, in its description and its consecration. But, after all that I have given you, you bar me from participation. I have let you persuade me & I have let you seduce me. Your wild love has taken my strong mind, and broken it. I will not let you break my heart.

Before I go:

A story of my own::