Existence
Part 1
"Remember this, --that very little is needed to make
a happy life."
Meditations. ii. 67
"Man…
"It is the mind that makes the man, and our vigor is
in our immortal soul."
Metamorphoses xiii
I don’t know what first prompted me, when I got out, to help people.
A desire for justice, perhaps, or just the need to make up for what happened.
But if I really wanted justice then I would have begun destroying the Centre from the outset, and if I wanted to make up for what had happened, I would have gone to all of the people who I harmed, or their families, and told them what had happened.
People always want answers to their questions and this is always more so in a tragic event or even a near-tragic one. But I could never bring myself to go and admit to being the cause of their problems. Would it have helped? I tried to convince myself that it wouldn’t. But I’ll never really know whether it would or not.
My life is
easy. I have no responsibilities and no one is counting on me for anything. But
my life is lacking and in some ways that is more difficult. At least if people
are relying on you, it means that they are your own. I have no one and this is
both a blessing and a curse. Yes, I’m lonely. Well, sometimes. I keep busy, as
you might have noticed, but there’s always time to reflect and that’s the
danger. Once Sydney talked to me about the possibility of finishing it all but
that’s not an idea that I can deal with. Problems might seem severe but there’s
always a solution somewhere, even if it’s not immediately obvious. I mean, in
my time at the Centre I met quite a few people who killed themselves, unable to
deal with what they were being forced to do. Not that I was told that they
killed themselves. The official line was that they had been relocated to
another site. At least that’s what Sydney told me. I saw no reason to doubt him
then. Of course there are plenty of things that he told me which were also
untrue. It makes me wonder how much I can trust anything that he’s said to me
over the years.
I’m happy, to
a certain extent, with my life. I can look back on the last few years with
satisfaction, and even in the Centre I was of the belief that what I was doing
would be beneficial, saving lives. Of course, pleading ignorance is no real
excuse, but it’s the only one I have and the one that I truly believed at the
time. If I could change the past…but I can’t and there isn’t any reason to
think of the "what ifs". All it does is create a certain amount of
stress and that’s never helped anyone unless they have a viable means of
allowing it to escape. I don’t. I have a bad habit of berating myself for
everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life. And that comes back to the idea
of "what if". Nice vicious circle, huh?
So, anyway,
that’s why I keep so busy - an attempt to escape from my own thoughts and ease
some of my guilt by helping someone else. I figure that if I run around all day
helping people and keeping myself totally occupied, by the time I fall into bed
at night, I’ll be so exhausted that I won’t have time to remember or think
about anything before I’m asleep. But there’s the little problem of the dreams
that I have. See, I thought that if you were exhausted, you were less inclined
to dream because your brain would be too tired to think of things like that.
Only that theory was a little out. My nightmares are usually worse than the
things I think about when I’m awake. And they only haunt me worse when I can’t
remember them properly. Which happens quite a bit. I guess you know how
frustrating that is. Like when you have a comment in your head but it vanishes
somewhere between there and your mouth. Except that my fear is that it will
always be a memory that would have helped me to recreate part of the life that
I lost when I arrived at the Centre. Or even from my time in the Centre. One of
the reasons that the DSAs are so valuable to me, annoying as the lack of
privacy was at the time, was that it gave me a chance to see SIMs and other
events from an unbiased perspective. A camera can’t be judgmental. It shows you
everything, whether you want to see it or not. Most of the time I don’t, but
often I just can’t help myself.
My view of the
world is a little different from that of most people. I guess it’s because I
don’t know it as well as they do. But maybe, seeing it through clear eyes, I
understand it even better than they do. After all, they’ve never known anything
else, whereas I’ve experienced an alternative life, if it merits that title. So
much of what I see makes me angry and frustrated, not only because of the bad
parts of life, but also because people so rarely value the good parts. Like the
freedom to go wherever they want to and to do what they want. But the worst
thing, the one thing that I can’t bear hearing is when someone says that they
aren’t appreciated or loved by their parents or friends. Sure, some people
don’t get on with their parents or other members of their family, but if they
lost them, the grief would be enormous, whether they allowed themselves to
admit it or not. And I defy anyone to say that, if they did disappear, no one
would miss them. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t mean something to someone,
even if they weren’t actually aware of it themselves.
In some ways,
crazy though it sounds, I’ve had experiences, which, in the end, have become
beneficial. Not because they were good at the time but because they have taught
me something, either about other people or about myself. And I’ve learnt that
it’s often the way with seemingly negative things. You go through the pain and
difficulty, and when you emerge from the tunnel of darkness and unhappiness,
you can look back and realize there was a reason, a purpose, and that whatever
you have lost, at some point, provided you don’t give up, you will gain
something equal to it in value.