I thought smashing something into her face was the best solution. I was sick of resolutions and compromises and being a good listener, or pretending to be. I’d do it too. When I fantasize about violence its not my conscience that stops me making it a reality, I’m pretty sure its cowardice. I think about the consequences- trouble it’ll cause me, pain I might receive. I think if I lived alone in the woods then I would quite easily hit someone with something heavy until they stopped wriggling.
I’m not really a good person.
So there I was, imagining myself slamming this girl’s head into her desk. I went into detail. Focused on how her hair would strand together with blood and how maybe her nose would be crushed and ground up. She deserved it. I had no qualms.
I didn’t do it of course, there were too many teachers and students around, and she was too tall, and with too loud a mouth. All those feelings sank away gradually (like when that boy in Titanic faded away into the water) I could still feel them, a presence. A reminder.
I hurt people a lot. I’m mindless when I say things, I hurt their feelings like they are these fragile little moths with sticky feather-light wings, and I stomp around in iron boots crushing anything that comes close to me. I had a sort of epiphany about it a while ago. I was thinking about him, and I realized, that some time, some day, I would hurt him. Not that I could, or might, but that without a shadow of a doubt, whether it was tomorrow or in ten years, I had guaranteed it, just by coming into his life. That got me down for a while. It made me realize that anyone I ever become close to will get hurt by me at some point. And that it sn’t even specific to me. All people, everyone who exists is just pain waiting to happen. We all have swords over our heads all the time, and the rest of humanity is holding them.
I can’t even remember what I thought after that. It might have made me sad. But I think I probably had some little advantage to add to it, though I can’t remember what it was now.
I was watching a film, this one called Hard Candy, have you seen it? The one about the girl who goes to the paedophile’s house and tortures him and in the end kills him as revenge for all the things he’s done to other girls like her. She was so calm and smart. I saw similarities between us, and I almost thought myself capable of some of the things she did. As I was watching the film I saw a flick of black out of the corner of my eye and, trained for arachnophobia as most young people are, I glanced around at it.
It was some kind of creepy wingless fly, and I’m not usually too skittish about these things, but you have to understand it was right next to me on my pillow. This black bug thing on my BED. I didn’t particularly like this, really the thing should have bought me dinner before deciding to share my bed with me.
I got up slowly, and moved away from it, noticing that it was in fact as rather large beetle, not as my intelligent first thought had conjured, a fly. It was gross, and I didn’t want it near my bed nor me, and as it wasn’t going to sprout wings and fly away, I picked up a glass from the floor and a postcard. In rather cliché but effective fashion, I trapped it with the glass and slid the card under, and tried to shake it out the window.
The bugger wouldn’t move, those stupid sticky feet staying firmly placed on the inside of the glass. I left the glass downturned on the outside window sill, figuring that when the thing moved down onto the stone I’d remove the glass Hey Presto and close the window.
I made myself pasta, watched more of the movie, and then went back to check on the horrible black-legged thing. It didn’t appear to be on the inside of the glass, though it was steamed up a little.
I lifted it, and the beetle fell out onto the windowsill on its back.
Dead.
It wasn’t moving. I saw its underbelly and its outturned legs and it was so STILL, I looked again at the inside of the glass, steamed up, with marks from its feet imprinted into the condensation. I hadn’t thought it could suffocate. Stupid.
Those awful marks, as though it had been scrabbling at the glass, out of breath, trying to escape as I’d blithely been chomping down cheesy pasta. I imagined it screaming, in pain, it…DYING. They reminded me of human fingers, clinging to the edge of a cliff, or beating on the glass of a window trying to escape a gas chamber. One little dead beetle had managed to have all the significance to me as my own personal holocaust. That glass was my gas chamber, and insects my chosen prey.
Sure, I didn’t LIKE the thing, but my own sheer stupidity had KILLED something. I was, in essence, a killer. I couldn’t stop staring at that stupid dead bug. I felt so sorry for it.
There was suddenly a huge gap between me and the girl in the movie.
Apparently killing some pointless insect set of a spiral of guilt in me, surely then, it followed that I DID have a conscience. Interesting. If I was so compassionate about a black legged beetle then maybe my friend who I hadn’t believed at the time, was right when he said I was a caring person. Maybe I was a decent human being. It was a sort of epiphany. I guess you could say it reminded me of my own humanity.
I sat for five minutes letting all this crawl through my brain, then picked up the remote and unpaused the movie again.
