Red-Eyed and Wrong
While other people chase happiness—sometimes desperately, sometimes successfully, arriving at it as money or love or freedom—I maintain a tradition of mental destruction. A recurring demolition, every few years, leveling whatever I’ve managed to build. An almost passionate devotion to making my own life harder, and the lives of people near me harder too. Put two roads in front of me and I’ll choose the wrong one. Every time.
It starts in my own head: thoughts lifting into some atmosphere beyond good and evil, drowning in false pride and illogical priorities and invented hatred, growing angrier and uglier by the minute. Everything becomes about me, right now, immediately—and anyone who doesn’t comply deserves a level of suffering they couldn’t have imagined. I urge myself forward. Yes. Yes. Yes.
It doesn’t take long before I’ve become a ticking bomb waiting for the right moment—preferably detonating directly in the hands of someone who has, in a very short time, become an extraordinary presence in my life. Someone so thoroughly good that I cannot cope with it, because I’m an asshole who defaults to looking for the worst in things, and when there’s nothing bad to find I grow restless and bored and then I become the thing I was looking for: a walking, spitting, swinging monster that knows no limits, no reason, no restraint. Reality, however loud and close, gets consciously ignored.
I reach for facts that aren’t facts. I pound on opinions whose structure is indefensible. I beat verbally on someone who wanted nothing except to not hurt me, and I thunder and roar and slam as hard and as dishonorably as I can manage. The voice deep inside me, the one that has been screaming from the beginning asking whether I’ve completely lost my mind—I drown it in my own pounding hatred. I’m God right now. You have nothing to tell me.
One moment of clarity would end this. One silence. One nod. One collapse inward. But every reply I receive I read as a fresh challenge. I can’t stop. I’m in a rage. My fever boils over. It gets ugly—saliva and fury, everything shooting outward. I want only to hurt blindly, to become the source of a fire that doesn’t go out.
Like a machine gun I fire one lie dressed as truth after another into the body standing in front of me, each one forged in a confused and miserable head that is desperately trying to place itself at the center of the universe—a head that could, in every aspect and at every moment, be safely ignored.
I’ve stopped thinking about consequences. About the future. About a way back. The bridges left to me I fling away with red eyes. The voice inside that minutes ago was still trying to calm me down—gone. I executed it. Lightning shoots out of me without direction. The person in front of me, who wanted only the best for me, looks at me and holds my arm. I tear myself free. I rear up one last time and dissolve in a cloud of destruction. I see wet eyes. Then everything goes black and quiet. Is this the end?
When I come back to myself I find the battlefield around me. Empty. Devastated. The triumph of my choice—of refusing to back down, refusing to return to reason—is a cold and icy world in which only I remain. No voices holding me back. The other person is gone: not just driven away but laughingly demolished, enthusiastically razed to the ground, out of pure contempt for every boundary that existed. I am alone.
The demons that drove me to bomb my own happiness one more time have vanished without a trace. What fills me now is only regret—but by the time regret arrives, everything is already too late. I know this. Everyone knows this. So I stand up, brush the dirt from my clothes, and keep moving, with the only hope I have left: that next time I’ll choose the right road. One that doesn’t turn me into a walking, spitting, swinging monster that knows no limits, no reason, no restraint. One that knows what it has when it has it.