In a prior era the inheritance of most men would be a farm, or maybe a village to be the bridge builder. Some structure, a mild respect if you aren’t the drunk. But most of all a family. Extended families too and perhaps an elder that had some vision lingering before their passing.
It is this inheritance that makes the burden of being a man a bit more palpable. Watching the children play and the wife worrying about bruisings from day-time adventures – the joy of seeing them live securely and benignly while you wrestle with secrets lurking around this world and in you.
It’s not coincidental that this is a distant viewing before you go back to your own tasks. It is only a reprieve between whatever you build, as staying too long causes a deep nausea and searing mind. There is no room for men in these idyllic pastures. It is instead in mines, or cities, or whatever misgivings sergeants bark before deployment.
Though there never was room in these idyllic pastures, they at least existed. You once roamed such pastures after all. Sitting comfortable in a school chair all the way to diploma. Then the pastures slowly detach themselves from you, and after a first alcohol and a police officer crossing so it registers you are completely ejected. Where you board the subway and bus to see uneasy glances make their way, and it’s revealed now you are the guilty-until-innocent monster, lain dormant. Because History isn’t in one’s favour. You are what nightmares come from.
So, while our three letter terrorweavers spin their wheels and however you want to profit in this blood capital exchange, at least you could look back and figure it all as necessary evil to keep our contrast consistent and epistemologically sound against those family pastures.
But as of today such evils seeped into those pastures. Nothing remains, everything is a mental wasteland. There is no more reprieve nor comfort that, while you fuel the endless wars in the system plugged in, so at least there was a child smiling. At least a wife watching and working, random gossip.
Instead the warfare has pilfered these honest plains, and the children are eviscerated, and the women are morphing for survival. Adolescence has extended well into one’s 40s to ignore this crisis, but it’ll eventually register too, and serve as the final nail to the cross.
The monsters are everywhere now, and you are one of them, and you learn to accept your molten skin.