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.