Of course I’m staying quiet. Of course I haven’t brought any of this up. Why would I bother if I already knew that you would not listen? Why would I keep a firm grip on such foolish persistence? You’d think that after all these heavy years I would learn. Guess what. I did. So to hell with the apples. To hell with the praise.
Tonight, we bury.
You may be thinking to yourself, I thought you were a man of second chances. And I am. I am not, however, a man of twenty second chances. I’ve warned you before. You only get so many warnings. We’ve all got to draw the line somewhere. I drew it far. You’re the first to cross it. Everything beyond that point is all you.
There is something I never understood about your kind: this inexplicable desire to reduce yourselves to worthless garbage. Is it not apparent enough that drawing limbs on a snake can easily render a masterpiece worthless and transform it into a preposterous, laughable piece of work?
The situation is nothing new. Naïve fangirls fawning over the shallow celebrity, when there is no celebrity. There is no fame. No splendor, no dreams, nada. Only a hollow man — no! A hollow puppet, its strings linking back to uncaring puppeteers whose sole interests are profits and rising shares. In their negligence they have spawned thousands of these drones, filled their minds with this diseased programming, and unleashed them into society. The only reason why you don’t see them is because you don’t want to.
If this is no novel scenario, why must I say all of this? Sheer disappointment, plain and simple. All those romantic beliefs of exchanging happiness for truth… amounted to this? Discarding the true narratives — things we’ve held on dear — in order to connect to these fools?
And what makes them fools? The hollowness (a given), in combination with their blind appreciation for crude entertainment. They learned life from reality TV. All attempts at a more personal form of communication has been and will continue to be treated as nothing more than a chore, a drag, just something to get it over with. An insult to yourself it will be when you sink to their level of intellect. Drinking their Victory Gin. Eating their decayed fruit. Emptying out your personality and replacing it with their soulless, corporate pop. Love the same way they do. Is it still so personal when they all learned about love from TV? From movies?
No, I’m not intervening. You can trust me on this. I will simply lie awake, like I always do. I’ll be there when you trip. Just to see you fall. I won’t save you, not because I can’t, but because you don’t want to be saved. So I’ll just smile for you. Because by then, you won’t be able to. It was nice knowing you. No. It was nice knowing what you used to be. Here’s to the end of a good run. Finally.