Whatever we did, we did for power.
Money. Love. Beauty. Respect. Family.
Power to control, to seduce, to create, to morph.
Science to control our surroundings, psychology to control ourselves. Society to control our world.
Everything you could have possibly yearned for, anything you could want, in the end, was merely a tireless quest for dominance.
It sounds vain, even as I think it. To reduce the entire of our lives, all our hopes, our dreams, our drive, as they would say, to one pathetic power-play.
But to be vain itself is a power, to have the power to be vain, to be selfish, to think only of oneself. A luxury. How we wasted it.
Don’t be like that, they would tell us. Serve. Adapt. Fulfil.
Be selfless, sans the self, shrink yourself, smaller, smaller, until you no longer exist.
How can you want when you are not in being?
You are content, they told you. Happy. This is what happiness feels like.
How were we to know?
It’s why we fell in the end, I think to myself.
Because there was that ‘more’ lingering in the air, more power over the other person, loved more, respected more.
Big words like ‘unconditionally‘ and ‘forever‘ thrown about, disrupting the balance.
When we fought over the TV remote, the restaurants, who paid the bill, who fed the cat, who took out the trash. Hands flying, head shaking, dishevelled, letting loose, words spewing out of red lipstick, I remember, there was so much red towards the end.
How trivial, we thought, how mundane.
In the end, it was those little things that did it.
We laughed about it afterwards, of course, hands clutched together, eyes smiling, mingled sighs and half-hearted apologies.
But the more was still in the air, whispering, scheming.
They say that when you go deaf, it starts off as just a small humming in your ears. And then day after day, night after night, it slowly drowns out the world around you, until it’s all you can hear.
That was what it was like, this ‘more‘. It was like going deaf, deaf to what you have, right before you. More, more, more.
When we pretended we didn’t care, hurting, hurting so much, battered, broken, tired, oh-so-tired. That was about power too.
Apathy. Ignorance. The less you care, the better. The less you know, the less you care. Close your eyes, go in blind, go in deaf, more, more, more.
We craved the imbalance and we paid for it. The scales finally tilted. We fell.
In the end, we fell, falling, falling, was that power?
Was I happy, then?
I can’t remember.
The fall was a grey blur, a single whoosh, a rush of blood to the head, passion, lust, rage, hunger, us gasping for breath, breathless.
It was breathtaking, as they would say.
That’s not always a good thing.
Photo by Yessica Villalobos on Unsplash
