Dear Killer

Sometimes I imagine we're all like paper stars, folded up and gathered together, each of us convinced that we are glittering and celestial, each of us bent into a shape so we believe we're something we're not.

What a pity it is that we've lived the lives we've lived.

I kill on order. I am everyone's assassin. I belong to no one but the grim reaper herself.

There is no escape for me now, I know. Everything is over. I had my run. I was a murderer, a beautiful one, but I lived in a house of cards all my life and now it's all coming back to punish me, and there is no escape.

We are all told from the very beginning that we are important. From the moment we can first understand words and perhaps even before then, we are continuously reassured that we have a place in things , that we have a part to play. The human race as a whole is a hopeful species. Of course there are exceptions. Some forgotten children, ones who slip through the cracks. And not everyone is told that they will be important in the same way. Not everyone will be a doctor, or a lawyer. Some people grow up believing that their importance is to love someone fully. Some people grow up believing that their importance is to be loved fully. Perhaps the reason my mailbox was always secret was that the people who visited it came to believe that keeping the secret was a piece of their importance. Maybe I was always given murders because they all thought that contributing to my legend was their importance. But we are all taught, in general, in some way, that someday our worth will be revealed. Someday we will be justified. Someday we will be free.

For some people a thing may be right, and for others it may be wrong. There is no greater truth to morality -it is merely an opinion.

In a way, losing hope and losing importance are the same thing. It is that youthful vibrance, that eternal longing and believing, that makes youth so important--if you grow old and lose that without finding another way to be important, you will slip away, fall into insignificance, like one sheet of paper. You may be useful, but you will never stand out from the crowd. You cannot look at a piece of paper and say, "I remember you." You never can.

Freedom is just another word for no one cares.

Volatile repose. The words just kept occurring to me. It was a perfect description of me -quiet, calm, but on the edge of something vast and dark and dangerous and explosive.

But was it worth anything? That's the hopelessness of it. The openness of it. The part of it I can never understand. I am afraid of ambiguity and certainity and permanence and impermanence. And so is everybody else.

What a pity it is that we've lived the lives that we've lived.

It’s hard to feel alone when you’re me, sometimes. Sometimes even the houses crowd me in. I can imagine the people in them, still sleeping, or making breakfast, or dressing for work. It’s hard to feel alone when you’re me, when you can imagine the throbbing of blood through each of them and you know the way each of them breaks, like dolls lined up on a shelf.

What does it mean to be me? I don't know. Maybe that's just it. Maybe it doesn't mean anything. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe all I am is emptiness, is nothing.