9 May 2014

The "C" word


I have been pondering deeply about mortality of late - not just my own but all of ours really.

Yeah the old "what's it all about shit?"

I am well aware that this is an impossible, subjective and unanswerable question that drives humans mad and it causes vast amounts of them to turn to matters of devotion that have no basis.

They are blind - both the people and their faith.

I am talking about religion and stuff.

The hereafter.

It's a nice distraction from the now.

A belief in Something.

Anything.

Sure.

Right.

Whatever.

They say that we are all of us in some way touched by the "C" thing.

It is a far nastier word than the 'cunt' that the 'C' may have suggested in the title.

Oh dear did he really write that?

Cunt.

There, I wrote it again.

It's just a word and I agree it is a somewhat crass vulgarity that is a descriptor of a part of a woman's reproductive organs but it is nowhere near as distressing or harrowing as the other 'C' word. Chaucer used it a lot though and he is considered one of the greats in English literature. 

'Ye cunte' though he spelt it - in the old English way.

The other "C' word is cancer of course.

The disease - not the Star sign.

I don't know who these 'they' are - however 'touched' is an understatement of a cliche and it is not an apt enough description. It is more of a bowling over.

It is a steamrolling.

I haven't got it - well not anymore anyway. I had a bit of it a while back but it seems to have gone away and it was comparatively just a tickle. I have a person I love a lot and another I am really fond of who are well and truly 'touched' and it is fucked. There is a fear and terror within me that I can't recall having as an adult - although I know that I have experienced it before. 

There is a vague echo or a dim and distant memory of something similar that I experienced when I was a little boy and my Dad was away in a war in a place called Vietnam. It is a panic and a hollow distress that I felt too when my Nanna and my Grandpa died. 

It is like this most terrible despondency has been locked away in a dark recess of my mind and it has been released again. It was a trickle at first and now it is a gushing that has engulfed and at times it has overwhelmed me. It is despondency that is drowning me.

It is blackness.

It is despair. 

I am utterly exhausted but I can't sleep. 

The people who are inflicted - my very much loved one and the one who I am very fond of - must of course be more scared than I - but their serenity and acceptance amazes me. Strange as it may seem their bravery shakes and terrifies me more. Whilst their bodies weaken in the fight against cancerous and mutating genetic material within cells it is me who draws strength from the souls that reside within their diseased bodies.

I feel disturbed and guilty by this and even now I write this thinking that it may be cathartic but it is not.

It is not.

I plough on with work and I socially interact with a bravado that isn't real.

It is a facade.

Discussions at work about budgets and travel and plans and drawings seem trite and I am nauseated by the superficiality of some people around me. I am hyper-sensitive to it. One such person is forlorn and sobs because she feels that her career is at a standstill because another person has seen her transparent ambition and has quelled it. She is a local girl and the shallowness masked behind her saccharine smile has been revealed. I blame the high and rigid expectations that Singaporeans and indeed many Asian countries put on their youth. This girl was always going to be found out. People like her always are. She is not yet thirty and she weeps solely for herself and her self-inflicted failures.

She moans and carries on. 

"Ooh I hate my job - I work so hard - she is such a bitch - my Daddy never loved me" 

In my current frame of mind I can find no pity for such self-indulgent egotism. I have no patience or tolerance for fools like this when people who I love are afflicted by cancer.

Such people disgust me. 

They are cunts.

I don't know what to do other than to just continue on - but I know too that I am a coward and I do not want to lose the people I love. If there is a deity out there take the egotistical self-centered bitch and others like her instead

Take them now.

Everything seems very ostensible and a bit pointless at the moment.

I am neither manic nor permanently depressive and I know that this will pass.

I know that mortality is simply an inevitability - but life and death and cancer are real and they are scary.

So too is loss and the fear of it - the unjust horror of it.

I am feeling it in a wave again now.

It is smothering me.

  

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