Fragments of my innocence

 

"You''ll end up hurting someone one day", she once said, my good mother, about what she perceived as the desperately selfish nature of my character, "and, after her, yourself", she then added upon a second's reflection, "and" - she finished - "once you hurt yourself with your own selfishness, you'll note there's no point in being selfish, for that ultimate self-serving trait of character will turn to serve its opposite purpose, and destroy  you instead".

She cared about me, my mom, of course, and for no one else, and that's why she was concerned about my own selfishness-induced degradation. What she failed to see is that she was the selfish one, by seeing no further than her son's suffering, whereas the reality is that my deep concern is not my own suffering (which I have long embodied and learnt to live with), but how I may hurt others, and, in that sense, it was my mother's own selfishness that created in her the idea that I'm selfish, whereas, if anything, I'm just an egocentric floater lacking all sorts of emotional stability and unwillingly hurting people here and there, and, in the process, sucking in so much of their pain that I can now barely breathe, such is the suffocating guilt of making others live in the uncertain condition of loving me.

So no, mother, NO, you were wrong, I am not selfish, if anything I'm unstable and unreliable; and focusing on myself and solving my own problems can be called egocentrism, but not selfishness, because indeed all my self-centrism has always only had the sole purpose of working myself out with the objective of one day being a better and more predictable man. So don't mix selfishness with egocentrism, and meanness with unreliability, please.

If you were alive, mother, I would tell you just that: I am not a bad man, but a good-natured one, unable to be a good influence by the sheer default of an unstable (and thus unreliable) amalgamation of genes.

And I did warn them, mother, all of them, I told them, "My dear, listen to me!, I am not to be loved, for I am not to be trusted, and thus not able to love back". But did they listen, mother? (did you ever listen?), but of course not, of course they didn't, and they fell in the abyss of their own ambition to love and change someone who, precisely because he changes, should not (must not) be loved.

That could be one of the reasons why, as much as this random floating around in Space with no end in sight drives me to chilling desperation, I don't necessarily feel sad in the driving seat of this condemned device, but rather contempt that, at least here, far away from any substantial source of human feeling, I can minimize the harm I cause, and limit it to myself and Marcus.

Given Marcus' born lack of any sort of empathy - a trait less owing to his apathic character than to an irreparable absence of reasoning capacity - this spaceship is where I could ever less harm anyone with my brute, blunt and meaningless emotional inconsequence - apart from death, of course, but death is not a noble outcome for such a lover of life as myself.

(And, arguably, my disappearance would cause more pain than relief, at least in the short-run - assuming someone still remembers me back on Earth, of course, which I actually, come think of it, highly doubt.)

So yes, I told them, "don't love me", but what did they do, the opposite, of course, and yes, yes!, I wish I could have loved them back, but I couldn't, at least not for long, so I just dismissed them, like crumbles of bread, an they never understood (like you, mother, never did either), that I was doing it for them, and that, if anyone truly deeply suffered in the process, it was me.

But that was all before, and now I'm here, driving this hi-tech wreck, and, as much as I live in the peaceful knowledge that they're all now finally exempt of the magnetic possibility of loving me, I do miss it, or them, I do miss them, the old girls in the old days, the days when, even if causing some pain (to them and myself) I could at least live the thrill of female company, whereas now it's just Marcus, chrome walls, and a bunch of stars in a dark sky.

 

of Memory as a feeble reason

 

People often ask me "How do you do, Captain..", to which I generally reply "I'm ok thank you" too early and much before they can finish their question with "..to spend so many long months in Space in that ship of yours without feeling lonely and homesick and nostalgic?", and the reason I do cut their question short with my mundane behavioral answer is because I hate to tell them all how I live of memories, of memories only, of tiny bits of things I've seen and heard and smelt, and generally felt in my times as a feeling animal, (now that I'm no more than a substantive chunk of weight sub-organically cutting its long lost way through Space), and that those memories alone keep me going, or else, living, they keep me living - living, and not going, because in fact I am going nowhere, really.

(Even though this Ship moves, or so it seems.)

Back to the memory talk, it all annoys me mainly because memory itself fools me with its fading insufficiency, up to an extent where I sometimes feel I've lost it, such is the erosion of detail in every recall of a given episode. Take Annelise's face for example. Annelise was a beautiful nordic (Swedish, in fact, Swedish, see, this is annoying: that she was Swedish, this irrelevant fact I'll never forget; but anyway, I was saying, she was a beautiful Swedish) waitress I once picked up in the middle of a busy street in downtown Gothemburg, and we ended up in her bed, a bulky, white bed with smooth fluffy pillows embracing our entwining curl as some lazy cold (but sunny) autumn morning went on carrying its business outside. And in her bed I loved her, I loved very much, oh so much, I loved her so so much, and I know I loved and I know I felt with (and inside) her such a - and my spine trembles, recalling - discharge of everything else that was before, but yes, that love is in my memory now nothing else than the knowledge of having loved her that way, because in reality I don't remember anything about her and the particular way I loved her.

And that, plainly put - and could I not be putting things plain? -, fucking kills me, so much so that I'd almost rather just not even have lived it, because as I was loving her I was loving her also because I loved the fact that I could forever recall that particular feeling! And now time is passing and passing and passing, and the details fade and fade and fade - first went the lines of her face, then her smell, then (it took longer, but also they vanished) those sopranic moans of a lost doggy she made as I stroke her steadily, then her warmth, and her tits, and the colour of her hair - and ultimately all I'm left with is with her nationality and her name; a line in a list of names. 

And I obviously love to know that I once felt what I know I felt, but it frustrates me so much to not be able to feel it again in retrospect; it loses its meaning, really, memory has such a hard time keeping the sensorial details (details?) intact that it becomes just a meaningless string of facts and figures, like a table of achievements and failures reminding me that I lived but not allowing me to recall how I actually fucking did.

So when people ask me how I do it, and although I know that, with all its faults, it's indeed memory that keeps me going (memory as a reminder, but also memory as a guarantee that I might one day feel again), I just tell them "I do feel all that and much more; being the captain of a Spaceships sucks, and it's lonely and dark out there", and I keep from them - from the people that ask - that, despite its miserable forgetting nature, memory is the only proof that me and them - the people, again, those that ask and all the others - have that we actually lived, because - and this I don't need to tell them - whatever we call "present" fades in the exact moment that it exists, given that all that we feel, really, are memories of a moment just gone past.

And the reason I keep it from them, is because, for all it has done for me, I will never do memory enough justice for the essential gift it is, and I'll end up just bitching about its insufficiencies, and I don't want people - the people, ALL PEOPLE, now fuck, stop asking me which people, it's ALL, I mean us ALL - to embitter themselves against memory like me.

Because, you see, I'm a lonely drifter, out here, and all I have on me is memory, and it's too exclusive not to become oppressive, but you all, you're out there, you can build up this exact moment and keep creating memories, you don't need (although it would be nice, I know, I know) to rely on memories to feel alive, or even, to be alive. So you can live healthily with memory and ignore that it'll fade and rot, you can actually use its beauty without even noticing its demons (unlike me).

So yeah, people (which people am I actually talking about, I wonder; who could I possibly be speaking with, apart from poor dumb Marcus?) ask me "How do you do, Captain..." and I wish - oh how I wish - that they would leave it there, the question, or, for that matter, leave themselves there too, meaning, that they would just leave me alone.