They tell you this thing, maybe you read it in some book when you were too young and stupid to know better: “Behind all perceptions of man, only love exists.”
What a load of horseshit. My first thought was, No. Behind all the bullshit is just atoms. Empty space. A cold, dark, and completely meaningless void. And for a long time, that felt like the truer, uglier, and more beautiful answer.
But maybe… maybe the bastards who wrote that line weren’t entirely wrong. They just used the wrong goddamn word. “Love.” It’s too clean, too pretty. It’s a word they sell you on greeting cards.
But the need for it? The quiet, desperate, and completely animal hunger to just… connect? To be held, to be seen, to be heard, even if just for a minute, before the lights go out? Yeah. Maybe that’s closer to the goddamn truth. Maybe, deep down, under all the layers of armor and bullshit and cheap whiskey, we’re all just shivering in the dark, hoping someone else is shivering too.
So you’re standing in line at the goddamn grocery store, and some miserable sonofabitch starts yelling at the poor girl behind the counter because his coupons expired. And your first instinct, your good, honest, animal instinct, is to tell him to go fuck himself. To maybe break a bottle over his empty, stupid head.
But then you look at him. Really look. And behind the red face, behind the ugly, stupid words, what do you see? You see a man who is drowning. A man whose life is a quiet, slow, and completely predictable train wreck. A man who probably hasn’t had a decent fuck in ten years, whose kids don’t talk to him, whose job is eating his soul one miserable paycheck at a time.
You see a man who is deeply, profoundly, and completely fucked.
And maybe, just maybe, all that noise, all that pathetic, ugly rage about an expired coupon, maybe it’s just the sound of a trapped animal chewing off its own goddamn leg. Maybe, deep down, he doesn’t need a punch in the mouth. Maybe he just needs a fucking hug.
And what good does it do to yell back? To throw another log on his own private little bonfire of misery? You think your anger is going to teach him a lesson? Christ. You’re just two rats in the same goddamn cage, biting each other because you can’t reach the bastard who locked you in here in the first place.
Healed people, people who’ve got a little bit of quiet in their own heads, people who’ve maybe had a decent drink and a good fuck sometime in the last decade, they don’t yell at servers. They don’t scream about expired coupons. They don’t treat the world like it’s a personal goddamn insult.
So maybe that’s the real trick. Not to be “nice.” Not to be “loving.” Christ, no. That’s just another kind of bullshit. But maybe it’s just to see the cage. To see the quiet, ugly, and beautiful desperation behind the other bastard’s eyes. To recognize the same goddamn poison that’s been eating at your own soul for fifty-six years.
And maybe you don’t give him a hug. Maybe you just buy him a goddamn drink. Or maybe you just walk away, and you let him have his quiet, ugly, and completely necessary little war with himself.
Because behind all the bullshit, behind all the noise, maybe it isn’t “love” that exists. Maybe it’s just the quiet, shared, and completely honest understanding that we’re all just fucked. Beautifully, tragically, and completely fucked.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.
