Michael Seidlinger: The Strangest

It is irrational.

Checks and balances and roles and the stage, it all seemed rational but beyond the imprint of value, every dollar having symbolic value, every role having symbolic role, every action having a symbolic moral implication, it is just action and inaction. It is people together living until death comes.

The Prisoner lowers his chin. I interpret it as a nod.

Looks at the coffee, almost sips it but doesn’t. But to say that he agrees would be assumption.

I finish mine and soon have to use the toilet.

When I return to the bars, the Prisoner is gone.

The Prisoner does not drink the coffee. He leaves it on the narrow sliver of space between the bars. When it falls, it spills across the hall.

No one cleans it up. Its effects are temporary.

It dries and leaves no trace.

The strangest thing isn’t who I am, it’s that there is any momentum at all. When I sit up in bed, tuning into everything around me, I hear the gentle hum of what feels like time, the earth, the world hovering, feeding the being.

There is no control to this. I cannot stop it and interpret so I listen. I can only listen. The strangest thing of all is that I feel liberated in that moment. I feel everything fall out of place and exist as its own.

I see nothing in the lightless block.

Don’t need to look around to see it all. It is all there. There isn’t much to it. The line is a path that can only be genuine. It extends for however long a being walks. But the line blurs quickly. Like walking in snow, the line doesn’t exist moments after the person passes that point.

The strangest thing is that as I wait for death, there are others waiting for something to happen, believing life hasn’t yet begun. They hope for a good day. They hope that their new promotion will explain everything about their lives. They hope to go back to school so that their education will reveal more. Most of all, beyond it all, they seek the appreciation. They hope to join in on walking the line toward a fruitful life. When it might be that life is all that is assured. They live their lives without their notice.

The strangest thing is to see the line documented across society, used like branding, used and interpreted to be so much more than it really is.

I don’t know what it is. It is, maybe, nothing.

But I know that I am alive. I accept that I am soon to die.

I accept that all people live and die.

I accept that all people hope; it is natural. They hope to find meaning in the society that educates them and demands them to pay for entry.

There is something irrational that leaves something missing.

I hear the silence that isn’t really silence at all. That hum prevents it from being silent. This is the contradiction. This is what makes it all irrational.

For a moment I look at the notepad and consider making sense of it, writing it down. But I don’t.

That would complicate things.

I feel it now and I think enough to understand, though I can’t say that I believe. It is absurd to think anything more than the thought.

Those thoughts nearly drove me mad.

The same way their values, their actions, drove me inward, and caused my denial, my blind actions. I killed a man. I did. But I wasn’t there for the kill. I explained this — but I accept that I killed a man. It is as plain as that.

When I sit up in bed, at the dead end of night, I am the most alone. It is this loneliness that allows every thought only a moment’s stay.

If I sat up in bed late at night as a free man, I wouldn’t be free. I would be commanded to my laptop, my phone. I would look at a screen and I would delve. I delved for pages. The illusion made across likes and comments, constant activity, the thought that it all fits together. Everyone online searches for the very same thing they seek walking the street, working in their offices, on their soul-searching vacations.

They seek, but are willing to take the first thing they find.

It is on these sorts of nights, in a cell that offers no hope, that I can almost see something. I can almost liberate myself from this.

But I don’t. One moment in my cell could feel like forever, and I could easily live the rest of my life here. Nothing is taken that I didn’t give away.

Only tomorrow had any meaning, the routine masking actuality.

Once I lead the conversation — for a brief moment, I thought that perhaps it wasn’t too late to prolong my death.

People never change their lives. They are changed by their lives.

But the Prisoner wasn’t speaking.

After awhile, he left me at the bars for good.

That day I stood at the bars, looking at everyone that passed. I was like the other prisoners. They glared at each other, throwing objects at guards that passed. They were angry. And so was I. The anger blinded me and gave me something to believe in. I believed that having nothing to believe was horrible, was not worth the life to live. I looked and found nothing.

I was angry.

I thought back to the trial as if I hadn’t already given it too much thought; the trial, for it to exist, needed categorical meaning. It had only one consideration in order to make it just under society’s vast standards: I needed to be considered a monster. I needed to be the absolute opposite of humanity, of someone with a heart. Even though my heart still beats, and they will be the one that makes sure it stops, they used who I was and made me who I am.

I became a prisoner like any other prisoner. I fit in how I thought I wanted to fit. I was treated to work detail. I left my cell. I used the showers, I fended off the threats of others.

I walked the prison yard.

I walked the perimeter of the fence, looking for something. I looked for something I couldn’t find. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I believed I would find something. The belief gave me the courage to get there, but when I asked for more, when I hoped and truly believed that there’d be more to be found, my search yielded nothing. I walked the perimeter twice.

I found only what I expected to see.

By the third time I stopped walking and I sat on a bench. I watched the prisoners living. They all fit into society, each with their own groups, acting and building themselves up to fit what they had asserted. They asserted themselves, and various taboos, rituals, and categories intricately divided their society. They believed in these even though many didn’t think much of it. They placed value in both their social group and their performance.

They hoped to survive but in trying to survive, they became deeply invested in something that could show them that it meant nothing.

They ignored me but I couldn’t ignore them.

I watched as the group turned on a prisoner. It wasn’t just anyone; moments before the attack, the prisoner had been treated like a leader. Others followed him. Yet he wanted something else and based on what he believed he could attain, he reached for it. And he collapsed — his role collapsed.

The group cast him as an outsider. Society sees you not as the person you are but as the impression you’ve made. The straight line stitched across our foreheads are instantly seen and assumed; no chance to explain why that line might be there, or what sort of infliction might have occurred. Because of it we are no wiser. No more understanding of who they are and who we are.

We merely move on, seeing with a filter, the people for what they looked once. Not who they really are.

This is me, they might shout.

But people only hear based on memory.