There's the way things were, the way things are, the way things will be, and the way things have always been. And it's too bad, because no one ever gives much mind to any of these ways, except for the present. It's all about now now now, even though now is a very short and indeterminate time, and like everything else, it doesn't last. No one even bothers to look back or forward, because those things aren't important.
Turns out, people are just blind.
The way it was for me, it was:
Raised by my parents, who never saw each other and never spoke, even though they lived in the same house, and that's how they liked it. I don't remember it being any other way, and that's probably because it never was. Never bothered me, because I didn't know the difference. Not that I was stupid: it just didn't matter.
Mother was one thing and father was another, and that's the way it always was. She was myopic and whiny and didn't let me grow up until long after I shouldn't have been sticking around anymore. She was small and waif-like and I sometimes wondered if father didn't hate me just a little for not killing her when I was born. He's a real asshole, like that.
His thing was spite and controversy and hate - always hate. He raised me to hate, because it's stronger, louder, much more powerful than love. Hate's never a good thing, not to him, not to me, but it's a consuming thing, the right thing. Hate is what you're left with when you cross the line of indifference and take away love. Hate is a tool that you use for your benefit and others' ruin, carefully honed and dangerously wielded. He was a master of it.
I, however, never caught on too well.
One day, you're going to come along, and you're going to be the shining one, so bright I can't even see, the one who overpowers and outperforms, and you're going to be the one father taught me about, the one he prepared me for. You're going to say, "Pleased to meet you," and you're going to mean, "You are lower than nothing, and you aren't worth my time." And I won't be, because that's the way things work.
If I hate and you love and I fail and you shine, I wonder who will get the recognition? But you won't wonder, because it would never occur to you that it should matter, because in your perfect little world, it doesn't.
I just hope you remember some day that when light hits something solid, something real, it creates a shadow, and that's all anyone ever looks at. No one cares about the light, because that's what they were expecting.
To be like you will mean: to be the norm, to be the person everyone loves, to be the person everyone talks about when no one's listening, to be the one everyone suspects even when they shouldn't. To be like you is not to love everyone, but to love the right ones. To be like you is to be an angel with a tarnished halo, and will that make you any better than me? Does that make you any better than the devil with the flawless trident? Does that make you any better than any of the rest of us?
No: but you're going to think it does, because that's the way it's always been. And no one's going to tell you any different, because no one's ever thought about that.
It used to be that the underdog never got his way, because he never recognised the problem, never recognised how to fight it. And the problem was, it was himself. It was that he was a coward and a liar and antagonistic and no one wanted him to win anyway, so they'd do everything to keep him down. He was the original rebel, before it came in style.
It used to be that there was a damsel in distress, kept captive by the antagonist, and a knight in shining armour, who rescues her and kills him, and there ended the lesson, happily ever after. But who was the happy one? Was it you, the knight, with the weight of a murder on your shoulders? Was it the girl, with the unwarranted fight over who would claim her purity, as if it wasn't hers to give? Or was it me, the underdog, because I didn't need to deal with the utter bullshit of the world anymore - the world you created?
History's told by the ones who win, but the truth is, they don't deserve it. And the thing about the truth is that they don't remember what that is. Truth's a nasty thing, really. It has a bad habit of turning on you.
We've got our roles, and I know mine, so maybe you know yours. You're playing the good and I'm playing the bad, and you're playing to win and I'm playing to lose. The difference is, you don't know you're playing against me, and you don't know that I'm better at the game. You don't know yet that you're supposed to hate me, or maybe that you're supposed to love me, because you haven't been taught that that's the way it was and always has been and always will be. You'll learn soon enough, though, because I'm going to teach you.
I'm going to teach you the rules and how to fight and how to hate: all the important things in life.
But not yet. Because the way it is now, the underdog always wins. Because he never recognises the problem, never recognises how to fight it. Because he's a coward and a liar and antagonistic, and that's everything everyone wants to see these days.
You just don't know it yet.
We are not friends. We are not peers. We are not even equals. We are not two halves of the same thing.
I am me and you are you and there are no similarities.
There is no connection between us. There is no overlap. There is only a stark division and a sharp contrast, and we do not complement one another.
I have everything you do not, and you have everything I do not, but the thing is, we have no need of those things. I have no need of you and you have no need of me. We are two separate entities.
I can survive without you. And you can survive without me. If we are cut off from one another, we will flourish and thrive. I have no need for that which I hate.
But perhaps I lie.
Because this is how you see it:
I need you. I need you to hate or I am nothing. I need a focal point for my rage or I will lose control. I need you or I will lose definition of who I am. I need you or I will spin away and become lost in my own hatred.
And then here comes the law of the excluded middle, because this cannot simultaneously be and not be. One of us must be wrong, and I know who it is. I know who is reaching so far for truth that he touches a lie, and I know that he can recognise it. I know that he desperately wants to believe it the truth, but I know that he knows he cannot. I know he cannot live a lie, because it is not his nature.
And I know this because once upon a time there was the pure one who could not lie, and there was the tainted one who could not help it. I know that once upon a time there was the pure one who sought only harmony, and the tainted one that sought only to break it. And I also know that once upon a time, it did not end happily ever after.
But this is not some kind of fairy tale.
Because the truth is that:
This is a lie. This is an ideal of our own invention. These are roles cut out for ourselves, and they do not curve to fit us, but we bend and break to fit them. I may be on the wrong side of a losing battle, but I can distinguish a lie from the truth when I hear it, when I see it, when I live it. I know what we have done, and what we have created. It is something of our minds, the meeting of the pure and of the tainted. It is the corruption of good and the purification of evil - but there's only so much of that you can do.
Once upon a time there would be you and me and nothing else, just white versus black, good versus evil, love versus hate, the way the fairy tale has always been. There would be the enmity that everyone has always been watching, hearing about, waiting for. It could be that we would play our roles for everyone to see, and shed them when no one is looking. The roles would be for their benefit, and not ours.
It could be that you wouldn't be looking for your own benefit, anyway. You aren't ambitious. You aren't selfish. But you would be altruistic, and self-sacrificing, and that's what you would like to tell them - smiling for the audience and never for yourself. But not me, because all I would do for them is give them the enmity they want. For me, I would get to see you wither and bend and then break and then die. And it would be all worth it; because it could be that one day, it will be the protagonist who loses.
And I will be waiting to see you fall, because I hate you. I would understand the full power of hatred by then, because I would have had the time to hone it against you. I would know the words and the nuances and the strength vested in the one word, the one idea, and you wouldn't have a clue. You wouldn't be interested in much that doesn't concern you directly, and it would never occur to you that someone might hate you, and might use it against you.
You would be so blind -
You would be so stupid -
You would be so safe -
to think a single emotion couldn't hurt you.
No one would cheer for the hero who's too stupid to see what's coming for him, for you. And coming to him, and to you. They might think, watch out, but if you can't see it even then, no one's going to help you. And you would deserve every minute of it.
That's the whole idea.
There would be a turning point to the story, like there is in everything. And it would be the point when you realise that you cannot win. You would realise that you cannot fight hate with love, because it's a thing of the same substance. Fire puts not out fire; love quells not hate. You would try to fight me the way I fight you, but you would be loath to admit it: because the way I fight would be dirty and devious and evil, and you would not, could not, approve. You will have spent so much time concentrating on how despicable my entire character is - because, surely, it is - that you would not know how to counter it.
You would be so ignorant to think that what I lack is love, and that is why I hate. You would be so ignorant to think that you could give me what I need to free myself from this ever-consuming prison of hatred. And you would be so ignorant to think that I did not put myself there of my own volition. You would be so ignorant to think that I do not love the way my hatred spills over into everything, coating it slick with black oil and filth, claiming it for my own for everyone - everyone - to see.
And you would be so ignorant to think:
that you cannot kill me with indifference.