Why am I so fickle and changeable? Why do I slip so easily from fascinated thoughts, cheerful memories and larger perspectives to the accursedly narrow and inward-spiraling funnel of my own shrinking self, bad decisions and fumbled opportunities and all? Why are my failures so powerful?

Don’t get me wrong; I knew today wouldn’t be easy. I was aware since before I went to sleep last night that every step forward I took today would be ground gained against the Everest of defeat that’s trying to make each step my last. Most of the day actually went all right, because I focused on other things. I ignored the elephant in my mind’s room and thought grand thoughts about my career and future, pretending it would be all right, security-blanketing myself into thinking that one can move on; one can forget; one can be different.

Somebody once said that what you don’t know won’t kill you. He was right: in fact the things I don’t know are my friends and companions, my solaces and playfellows. Whoever that anonymous sage was might well have added that the converse is also true: what you do know will kill you, as it’s killing me.

I guess I never realized what I did to myself until a consequence showed up. I lobbed a bunch of grenades into the future and one of them just arrived, as I couldn’t have helped knowing it would. I wonder when the others will land and whether I’ll survive them. I wonder whether I’ll survive this one.

People don’t see me for who I am, but inanimate objects do. The lamp stares at me accusingly and the cup of tea is disgusted that I have to be the one drinking it. The book I used to own and just replaced remembers everything, and is ashamed of me. The piano is distrustful and stubborn. The bathroom mirror is particularly vengeful. Even the date on the page mocks me.

I can’t ask anyone why. I can’t blame anyone. Jacob bought Esau’s birthright for some soup, but he still had to go and steal it from him later. Fate is pretending that this bottomless pit I fell into doesn’t have anything to do with that chasm of failure I carved out back then, but I can see she’s lying. It is her exquisitely sweet revenge that I should land in a prison I made myself. I guess I cheated her once too often.

I can’t go back there, because I know the horrible self-loathing of that life, but I can’t move forward either, because I forged the chain that’s locking me to the damage I caused. There isn’t an out. And yet if my past weren’t so explicitly tied to my future there might have been one. Today I am reminded that there isn’t. Nobody goes unpunished in this life, whether or not they’re secured for the next. What goes around must come around.

I wish the medication of mystery could have been more effective. The secret wonder of the unknown haunts me. I was drawn into something larger than myself today. I really was. I wish it could have lasted longer. No adventure is possible without mystery. We humans try to know everything and then wonder why we’re not enjoying life. We think the consummation of our existence will be the day we don’t have to exert ourselves anymore, when all mysteries and unknowns are solved and known and we can truly live. Once we get there we discover that there is no life left. No adventure is possible without wonder; and a human who is never surprised will never know what being human is. We were designed to be inadequate, so that our joy would be in pondering what we didn’t know.

Yet today it was again what I knew that distracted me from what I didn’t. I wish I knew even less. Maybe my world can become so big that my mountain of destructive self-awareness can become a speck and vanish. But all it did tonight was grow until it blotted out the sun.

Sometimes I look at people walking about on the surface and laugh at all the things they don’t know; then I remember that they are the free ones and I’m the one with the chains. Then I remember that I won’t ever be one of them, even if they all think I am. I wonder how many of them are down in here with me. At least one of them is.

I’ll ask if there is a future, but I’m talking into the mirror, and the mirror is the past, and he won’t know. I’ll ask if anyone will ever see what I’m seeing as I stand there, despite the horror of even considering that that could happen. Then I’ll remember that the only person who ever saw me for who I am wound up in here too.

Wait, no, two people.

Then I’ll cry.