Fate and Misery and Despair

I know anger. I know misery, and I know despair.

My life has been shrouded in it from the time I was one year of age.

As my mother’s life force spilled out of her body onto hot bitumen, and she lay lifeless in my father’s arms, the three of us surrounded by sticky pools of crimson; a storm cloud has hung over us. My grandmother used to say it was a curse, I am not so sure. I think on the day that she died, my mother bargained her life for mine. ‘Take me, not her,’ and so it was that I lived, and she did not. And so, I survived, and therefore as fate must have it, the storm cloud must follow, because rules are rules. When it is your time, it is your time, and my mother chose to cheat the laws of fate.

So, even though I have known sadness and anger and misery and death from my very infant beginnings, I am surprised to be feeling rage in new ways, 48 years later. But I am. Over the past two weeks I have been growing this burgeoning ball of rage inside the base of my belly. It’s not a fire. No! It’s an inferno. It’s this rapidly growing blaze that I feel like I could lose control of any day now. The rage is raw and it’s so angry. There’s no sophistication to it, no intellectualism attached to it, no reasoning, no rationality. It’s just plain old rage, destructive and overwhelming.

For the first time in my life, I want to lose complete control. I want to pick up a baseball bat and smash things up. I want to watch glass shatter and walls cave in. I want civilisations to crumble and new ones to rise in their place, and then take a bat to those and watch them fall over and over again – all of it on repeat – until maybe the rage or the fire or whatever it is that’s eating me from the inside out has simmered down to smoking embers.  

And I know what’s causing it…it’s the state. It’s the power they wield over me, and I think their most recent action toward me, was the straw that finally broke my back.

I’ve always been like this. You can push me and push me and push me. And I will put up and put up and put up. Until finally I don’t. And I disappear, I leave, and I don’t come back.

But I have no agency here. The state is all prevailing. I can’t escape them. I can’t walk out. I can’t go someplace where they are not. I am a subject of the state, and I am their captive.

I feel like my back is to the wall, my hands are tied and there is no escape. And so, the rage builds. And it builds and it fucking builds.

And for the first time, I don’t know what to do with these feelings. If I submit to them, I will smash every building’s plate glass I can see. If I don’t, my body will continue to be wracked with this pain and discomfort that I am feeling in my shoulders, in my neck, in my back, across my forehead, and deep in the base of my belly.

I am so close to tears at least four times a day and even my eyebrows hurt from the thinking. When I close my eyes, I imagine violence. I have never been this way. I imagine throwing furniture at walls. I imagine slashing curtains. I imagine hurling bricks through windows and bats through doors. I imagine swiping contents off shelves and trashing rooms. I want to vandalise their worlds the way they have mine. I want them to feel dishevelled and violated the same way I do. I want revenge. Cold, hard, fucking revenge.

But it’s not how the world works for people like me, right? People like me have to swallow the rage down so hard and so deep that it forms this pit in our belly, like an ugly cancerous mass that eats our insides and poisons us with its toxins. People like me have to turn the other cheek, rise above it, be patient, the tide will turn, good things are on their way.

bull shit

This fucking fire is going to end up killing me the way it has killed so many people before me. It’s what the state does - death by a million blows. A slow fucking death.

And, hey…maybe I deserve it. Maybe it’s fate. Maybe it’s what should have happened on that lonely highway 48 years ago, I don’t even know anymore.

All I know is that there’s no tidy ending to this rage. No way to package it up and send it away. But the one thing I do know, if I have to carry it, I will make damn fucking sure they feel the weight too.