The Sociopath

“Look into my eyes.
I mean really look!
Do you see me?”

-Yes.

“No you don’t!
How can you really see me?
If you could really see me then you wouldn’t do to me what you’ve been doing to me!”

-I see you.
More than you’ll ever know.

“Tell me, then,
when you look into my eyes, when I open myself up to you,
what do you see?”

-I see you as you are.

“And that’s not good enough for you.”

-It’s everything there could ever be.

“Then what more do you want?”

-Nothing.

“Then why do you treat me like you do?”

-How do I treat you?

“If you saw me, you would know.”

I see you: I see your pain. I see the desperation in which you look for proof of your worth in my smile. I see how you look into the distance of my eyes for some sort of clue about which horizons we should all be searching for, how you use me as a mirror in which to see a you that is not you. I see your self-destruction and your reliance upon ideas, which were once connected to experiences, before they were written, but by the time they reached you, their bodily origins had died and they were but hungry ghosts, parasites latching onto host bodies to bemoan the loss of their former substance, reducing their hosts from people into equally longing, actively empty conduits by whose sacrifice they succeed in outliving their naturally allotted lifespans. I see your dreams for the future as inherited from the past. I see your paralysis. I see your sermons and your rabble-rousing as attempts to rouse yourself from an awful frozen slumber. I see your faith detached from action. I see your heart’s goodness, your noble intentions, and your breadth of vision, and I see them all wasted in the sarcophagus of a diary. I see your qualities and I see your fears. I see your beliefs and I see your memories. I see your dreams and I see their origins. I see you insofar as you are currently capable of being you. But I also see a you stretching lives beyond your current limitations. I see a you transcendent and infinite. I see a you immanent with a little time, who is also a you I have no words for, no claims to, no rhetorical trills that may help bring about. In the meantime, I see you as you are now. And I see what you want from me, what you think you need from me, and beyond that, what I’m actually in a position to give, which is only silence: warm, engaged, silence. That’s all I have and it’s the most I could ever give. I love you. I love you so much, with all my heart. I see in you and your body the process by which God creeps slowly from the mold of a cold and rotting tomb to a wildly leaping flame dissolving softly into Nothing. In you, I see History. In you, I see Physics. In you, I seeTruth. But it doesn’t matter what I see or do as we sit here together and you stare at me in nervous desperation. No, the only thing that matters is what you see, and no amount of disembodied words or ideas will ever affect that until you yourself practice opening your eyes. Until that day comes, the most I will ever be able to do for you is just sit here with you in warm, engaged, silence.

-Is it that I don’t say enough? That I don’t do enough for you?

“No, you say too much and you do plenty.
You just don’t say the right things.
You just don’t do the right things.”

-What would you like me to say?

“That you love me.”

-What would you like me to do?

“Prove it.”

-Why?

“...”

-...?

“Because I love you and I need you to love me in return.”

-Don’t worry. I do love you.

“I don’t believe you.”

-Then you don’t really see me.


4/16/2012 2:40 PM
On the BMX bus riding along I-25 and then US-36 between Denver, CO and Boulder, CO, finishing around Broadway and Baseline in Boulder, CO