theblackdostoyevsky

I am distraught, but not because of me. I’m distraught because I know that she is distraught. My mind knows no rest. A heavy weight is settling on my soul, like bowling balls finding the center of a mattress. My heart is, strangely, at peace. I’m reminded of a proverb:

“Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.”

I perceive this to be true, though I don’t know how. My heart is light, but my soul is heavy. My heart is wicked and deceitful, but I will rejoice in hope. Hope of what? Of that, I’m not entirely sure. And for the first time in my life I’m not anxious for this pain and heaviness to subside. I’m content to allow it to press and shift and come to its rest. Let my countenance grow as sorrowful as a mask, so that my heart may skip like a calf.

 You see, I’ve been a childish man all the years of my adulthood. I enjoy the jest and fun. I secretly enjoy making women clutch their pearls and men close their eyes and wag their heads at me. I make myself to sit at the children’s table, and I tell them jokes and ask them important questions. I take pleasure in toys. No, not those kinds of toys. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) And I have always judged the surly and silent expressions of those we call “grown-ass men.”

“Life has beat them into submission,” my heart presumes. “They’ve allowed the world to steal their joy.”

Or else, they are silently confounded by some secret transgression, bound by their own depravity and afraid to speak even a word lest a confession escape from their lips like a wet toad. I prefigured that the quiet gravity of old men was evidence of their drunkenness. I feared to stare too long into those rheumy, yellowed eyes, wide with hidden fear.

“But I saw it,” I think. “I know. Fear is there.”

Of that I am certain. Yet, I was wrong to attribute their quietness to it.

            I understand their silence, now, and their gravity. Their ways are becoming mine. I am becoming a man. Therefore, it’s time for me to put away childish things. Perhaps not my love of spending time with children (though the older I become the more suspicion this love is met with by “serious” adults), but the jesting, the fun. Fun is not of this world, just as joy isn’t. And I am discovering that too much of it out loud enrages the mature sensibilities of those who are perpetually warring against their own despair.

Can you imagine a yacht passing by a man treading water in the midst of the sea? The music, raucous and celebratory, all high hat and trumpets, arms flailing in rhythm, spilling drinks and laughter and bed springs and the children crying. They wouldn’t even hear him scream. He’s too far below deck in that black, brackish water. The party drifts ignorantly past. Can you feel him freezing, his legs frantic like a duck’s? That man would be so furious that the strength of his anger would keep him on top of the water another several hours, when he might before have been content to allow himself to sink, waiting for his heart to explode as he descended further into the horrific darkness. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation . . . ” and expressive joy mocks their incessant and unending torments.

            People are full of duplicity. It is a wonder that we all haven’t yet caved under the lies we live to tell. Truly, all the world’s a stage and everyone is acting a part. Problem is none of the parts agree, and the production is a catastrophe, worsening by the day. But we have so embraced our roles, having written them expressly for ourselves, that we will not abandon them in the interest of balancing the script for a more satisfactory ending.

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

And, so, we agree: I will not “out” you so long as you do not “out” me. And we continue to perform our poorly veiled lies, keeping character stubbornly, without fear, because we have agreed that our insincerity is infinitely more pleasurable to manage when compared with the task of rewriting the entire dystopia. “There is a way that seems right unto a man . . . ”

            Me, being the childish man that I am, aggravates this agreement. I am always causing people to break character and then laughing at them. Poor actors, all of them, because anger is all it takes to make them show themselves. And nothing makes them angrier than exposing the truth of what they are pretending. I like comedians. They are simple and wise, but those gifts are expensive. A comedian needs two things: vision and courage. Vision to see lies, and the courage to show liars that he knows they are lying. But that’s a dangerous game. I am certain many a great comedian never made the stage because he was cut down and laid in his own blood before the world ever knew his name. And he wasn’t telling jokes. Jokes are a mask for the truth, like fun is a mask for sorrow, like marriage is a mask for envy, like religion is a mask for faith. So now that I am a man, with children of his own, it is time for me to put away childish things. Especially since I am not being paid for them.

I wanna live to see my children grow up. So watch me stay alive for a slice of the devil’s pie. Because to tell the truth, and nothing but it, and suffer the dismay and violence on their faces, to expose the lies you tell and believe upon this broad road to all of our destruction, to live out the true truth and confess before the world my sins and make amends and preach the reconciliation of all to God, who alone is true and wrote the good script that we all long ago abandoned, is to be too much like Jesus, His son. Everybody wanna go to heaven, but don’t nobody wanna die. Because that, death, is exactly what it’s gonna take to be like Him. Remember what he said:

“The servant isn’t greater than his master. If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

Follow him where? Well, where did he take his cross?

I understand these grown-ass men, now. These old niggas see everything, and they are the wisest people on the face of the earth, and nobody knows it but themselves. They know how to keep quiet. They are full of sorrow in their faces but laughing their asses off at the rest of us in their hearts. That kind of joy, in this perilous and wicked world, is as safe and as full as I’m going to get. So I’ma put away these petulant ways and live this old nigga life from now on. So don’t look for me smiling no more. That boy dead. Instead, fear the rictus grinning in my heart like the Cheshire in the dark, silent and knowing, my heart filled with pure bliss and contentment.

That is, until I get murdered by the police.