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The Devil is in Scotland.
His was a story that became more unbelievable at every turn yet somehow more undeniable—a story not just of devils and fiends, but of the darkness that nests within the human soul like a seed awaiting rain.
The blaze traveled from the mattress, up the walls, and spread to the ceiling. From my room to the next, then flat to flat, floor to floor. The whole building crumbled around me as it went up in smoke. The fire spread out across the city, razing homes big and small, churches, schools, destroying lives. Continued on up to the clouds in the sky and the moon and the stars, until the world was nothing but a raging inferno. It swallowed me and flourished, for my body seemed to power it, to nourish it. The destruction, the terror: I held it in the palm of my hands. And I liked it.
The fire spread out across the city, razing homes big and small, churches, schools, destroying lives. Continued on up to the clouds in the sky and the moon and the stars, until the world was nothing but a raging inferno. It swallowed me and flourished, for my body seemed to power it, to nourish it. The destruction, the terror: I held it in the palm of my hands. And I liked it.
A couple times I opened my mouth to speak and closed it again, crippled by the fear of sounding stupid or dull—then fearing I looked both stupid and dull for having not yet uttered a word. I felt vulnerable, exposed. An object of derision and contempt, even though no one had said a thing to or about me.
relate
The problem, it occurred to me, was that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to communicate: readiness to move forward, or a desire to step back.
That summer, I hardly left my bed. I did not work, or read, or dream of the future. Sleep became my occupation, drink my late-night pastime. I ate only what could be ordered to the house, for after a couple weeks my mother stopped delivering meals to my room.
A hundred PhDs wouldn’t make my father love me. He had made it clear the day of my graduation, and every day before it, that nothing I did mattered to him in the least.
It was hard to miss someone who had never been present in the first place, who had offered so little of himself as to be almost incorporeal. And yet I felt as if my life were over.
