Mild und leise

It's all very amusing.  You think because you've seen a few movies, a few TV shows, maybe you've read some books or a magazine article you think you understand.  You think you might have some insight into what makes me tick.  You think my mother complex defines me.  You think my abandonment issues inform my actions.  You think what you interpret as my indifference to human life must have some basis in childhood events, some signature moment when I was exposed to death at too early an age.  What is the right age to watch something/someone die I want to ask.  What's too young?  What's old enough?  


You stare at me confused.  Don't worry, it's a look I've seen before.  Don't be embarrassed.  Despite all your schooling, the books, magazines, movies and TV shows, I'd venture you've never met someone like me before.  And I know I lot of people might say that.  Expecially people with my healthy ego.  (I know I misspelled that word back there believe me.  I like to see it that way.  I like to hear it too--EX-pecially-- but the visual just toots my trumpet.  The "X" in the word--it reminds me of Sue Coutes in Racine Wisconsin.  It was a business trip and I met her at the bar in a restaurant called...what was it?  The Yardarm!  That was it...Bar and Grille, with the "e" there at the end.  [I feigned a poor recollection just then; it was an effect for your benefit.  It sounded stylish somehow.  Truth is I remember EVERYTHING from that night and all the others too.]  She (Sue) ordered an "EXpresso, please" and I felt a stir in my boxers and no amount of whiskey then could stop me, poor Sue.  In the end Sue looked confused too but eventually she seemed OK with it all.  And here, in a movie, the "killer" would say something like "I never heard her complain!" and laugh maniacally, but didn't say anything like that.)  


So, my ego.  It's something I hold tightly onto.  And I'm well aware what happens to me when it slips.  It's not necessarily a "looking on the bright side of things," the ego, but it is close.  Anyway, I just know that it helps me to keep up an outlook of self-encouragement, one might call it, and not give in to negative thoughts.  I don't know if you're thinking that the ego is the thing that keeps me out of trouble; that the positive outlook and my conscious aversion to the "down side of things" helps me function "normally" and that the occasional slide into a kind of loose, non-clinical depression might be the thing that brings about the bad stuff.  And by "bad stuff" I'm assuming that by now you know what I mean.  Anyway, though, the truth is it's the opposite--I think it's the ego that makes me immune ultimately to those feelings that might otherwise prevent someone else, someone not me, from relishing the feeling of someone's heartbeat conducting through certain kinds of wash-line rope being pulled tightly enough around a neck, making an X with the twine from behind, you know, to constrict and limit ones intake of air to a level low enough to cause slow death.  It's like a telegraph, the stutter-step blips of panicked heart beating vibrating through rope, but you have to listen closely.


And so it's the old him or me scenario, back to questions and statements of ego.  (Mostly though they're "her or me" scenarios in my case.)  But what I'm saying is that I could suppress my ego and just feel sorry for myself.  Maybe that would help stop the killing.  Allow the remorse to overcome me when it peeks in and makes me hide my face in the bathroom late at night; early in the morning maybe that's supposed to be, while I'm pissing in the dark, listening to the sound of water on water, and the memory loud enough in my head to sound like it's coming from behind the shower curtain, of Sue Coutes saying "expecially" right before I did what I did to her because right before I did it she was just talking on and on even as I started taking off her clothes, (and in this exercise she helped me, I guess she was into it for a time) and gabbing away even as I made fascinated circles with my finger tip around her huge left nipple protruding through the tank top I left on even after she was dead, part of it yellowing in the gathering pool of urine.  But I'm not willing to live that life.  I'm not going to crawl in the muck of my insecurities and second-guess myself constantly.  I do what I do because it brings me joy and it makes me feel alive and vital.  The alternative is death - living death but death all the same.  And it will be me that dies.  So I'm not willing to die.  It's her or me.  


I've read all the same books you have.  I've seen the movies.  It's not at all like that and you don't really know me.  I'm here, among you.  Sitting in the next office, riding across from you on the train, sleeping in bed with you at night.  I'm here and I'm alive.