The slob who bathes everyday but lives in filth. She brings a bar of soap and loofah to her skin but no broom or mop to the floor. Wears oversized clothes and remains affixed to her 1998 Dell desktop playing the same games day in and day out. Swipe a red gem to the left, a carrot to the right, up, down. Match. Win. Lose. Dust bunnies and loose cat hair play tag with her blackened feet. A week-old desiccated hairball cheers them on from the corner. She aches and sits in a fading mauve desk chair that no longer adjusts but can still roll, boxed in by tar stained walls from decades of smoking menthol cigarettes clutched between jagged fingers, tight and locked from arthritis. A monster. A monster who lives for nothing.
Or a depressed middle-aged woman who has no one to hold her, a husband who left her without notice but hangs around wanting to come back out of Catholic obligation. Whose parents have both been dead for thirty years, one of which offed himself with no note explaining why. Whose brother is cold and cynical. Whose nephew is cruel and absent. Whose daughters are opportunistic and failures though sometimes kind. But the only time her eyes soften and light up are when her grandchildren come to visit.
I am the monster for the “monster.” I don’t discriminate. I am the monster for those who some may think don’t deserve it. Little do most know, no one actually deserves my “affection” and no one actually deserves to die. But that is my lot. I make people realize their mortality. I make people see what and who is important to them, what they value. It is this way so that when they do rest, they rest easy. If they died in old age at this rate, they would never confront what they can with me here now. It would just be years and years of the same. Humans get stuck in habits, never want to change. It requires something life-altering that snaps them back into reality, makes them realize “Oh shit, I better do something with my life.” And I do that for them. I do that and they bounce back or I help them rest easy and prepare for the next time. They recognize what they love and they make peace with that which they struggled with. Honestly, it’s better than them taking their own lives. For that, they end up in limbo which is not a pretty sight. And people in the living world can have no peace over that kind of passing. They get consumed with thinking it was their fault, that they could have saved a life or something, but it doesn’t work that way. It is an individual choice, an ugly choice. I give people something better. They were tired of living, they were giving up. Or they get complacent, too comfortable. I am doing God’s work, but no one sees it that way. In the bigger cycle of life, they don’t see that I am God. I mean, they are God too, God is everything, in every single cell of our being. I function as part of them in this cycle of life. Humans only can see the finite. There’s a beginning and an end. But that journey is not singular; it is cyclical. And the struggles they deal with are the same they have always been. I allow them to get to their destinations with realizations so they enter the new journey with different eyes. Their work should be clear. I make humans realize that they are vulnerable, that they can’t waste time, it is up to them to make a change now. Or I make humans realize the most important things to them and they value that before they pass and it’s that warmth they hold on to as they go with their loved ones by their side.
Then there are those sad cases where they have no one and nothing to comfort them as they do pass. “Our orphans” though not many of them are actual orphans as understood by humans. Sometimes our orphans become angels. Their sadness and loneliness become their wings and they soar to look over other orphans. Or that’s how it’s been told to me. I don’t have a hand in that. But what is clear is that sometimes we need the hard to know our best selves.
writings by soul.in.my.fist 