why are you here?

Why are we here? Why is this the place I begin to go when things get rough, huh? Why in this beautiful cafe with its overpriced food - admittedly good - with these beautiful tropical trees and plants with the sunlight going through them, does my whole body begin to itch, like with the pins and needles? I sound like the Book of Job. I'm laughing, I suppose, because that is very true, and very apt. I can identify with the biblical character whose suffering is for no reason. There is no real way to reconcile the tragedy in the Book of Job, is there? One day he is okay, and the next day he isn't, and a week later he is okay again. Completely pointless. It always is completely pointless, but Job, you see, Job goes and asks the question, Job asks what the point is. And Job, of all people, a Bible character, a devout man, he feels there ought to be a point, that's what he has believed until this point. But that's all there is for him - this point, and the next point, and the next point. All the story gives us is a sequence of events. It's like sports. That's what their god appears to be doing, no? - sporting with their lives. Oh, the crowd is on the edge of their seats! Will he die, will he get better, will there be a miracle? - and there isn't any point to any of it outside of that. A coliseum's worth of spectators, watching the man suffering in the arena, eating it all up because they don't know how to feel the fear he feels any other way. They want life and they're draining his, tkaing it from him, rather than live their own. I do identify with Job. It is very uncomfortable to have a performer in your midst where he can see you as well as you can see him; and this is the way I feel when I am in a cafe having a very quiet nervous breakdown. I want the people around me to be uncomfortable, because I want them to be there in front of me. I want to share this burden and I know that nobody wants to look at it if they have to shoulder it themselves as the price of entry. So I go somewhere quiet, where the staff will not bother you, and everybody's conversations are only with their companions. Plants and tables and coffee, all of this is the set dressing that lets me live out my play in as much privacy as I can stand. And I have my quiet little nervous breakdown in piece. this way, I will not have to bother the people I love, who didn't ask for this, the same way I didn't ask for it.

You bring me to despair, you really do. So what if it means I never get out? I have been trying all this time and I am still not out. You understand that I have lost hope of getting out in this lifetime. I will die and be reborn, and if I am lucky I will be reborn to a good family, who will be able to fix me while I am still young, and then may I die and escape, and leave that good family grieving. I do not think I will be able to heal the child I am using the wretch I have become. I wish no longer to work, only to survive. Only to heal what I can and scar over what I can't, in hopes of preserving myself for the next life without doing further damage.

Old, and yet not so old; a rotting piece of meat with a piece of coal inside of it is what I am. As for who - well I haven't been given a name, for I was born in a gutter and have no name that I didn't invent. For your purposes you may call me Mephistopheles - and I know you are thinking of the cat character from the wretched musical, I have no doubt. That was not my intention but it is fitting to have my point stolen from me by an accident like that. Yes, very fitting.

Why am I here - why are you here? Who got to you so badly that you felt the need to come seek me out? scoffs "why am I here" - I've been here. I've been here this whole time. I work here. I'm trapped here. Years and years and years, and the first question after all that time is why I'm doing it. Well, I'm doing it because I have no other choice. I was told I needed to be here and then here I was, and that was that was that, for five more years after that too. I feel so alone all the time, and I feel - so angry, too. These years, there was a lot you probably got done with in that time, yeah? I bet you just had a ball procrastinating on things you had no right to procrastinate on. That time was not free, buddy. That time was mine and you stole it from me. All I have been doing for this entire time since you summoned me has been cleaning your shit up. I have been - I can't stop. That's the worst thing. I cared about you once upon a time but now I need to stop doing this and I actually cannot stop because you have trapped me in this with you.

oh god- then I die, I suppose. Eventually, or - or not eventually. I can't - I - it's not - it isn't differentiated to me anymore. Anything from anything. It's all - beige. It doesn't matter. I keep doing what I'm doing, and one day the wind-up runs down. That's it. Or it breaks. I mean, that's an option. It doesn't make much difference.

I don't know anymore, I- Someone who keeps her promises. Look what it's cost me. It's all that's real anymore.

I'm just looking for some relief, man.

Oh, so that's it, then? You, you just go through life untrammeled, unleavened, unrested - no respite - or you're trapped in your respite forever? Is that really it, in your world? Is that how you live?

Different from you, that's who.