FicWad

Who are you to us? Better: What have you become to us?

I remember how you used to be. I remember when you didn't leave your house because inside the lack of light and the smell of cigarettes and the posters on the walls was the only place you felt safe. I remember when you were dark and insecure and afraid and I know that it's sick and twisted and perverted and wrong but that's why I loved you. I loved it when you would call me at three-thirty in the morning and I could hear your voice quivering, telling me you’d Fucked up again because you’d had Just one too many and woken up cold and alone in a ditch. I loved to see your big eyes and soft lips and that tiny, pixie nose of yours crumple up as you tried not to cry in front me for whatever reason. Maybe it’s sadism or maybe it’s something else, but God, I loved it to death when you were full of an insecure hate for the world and your color was black because that was what you loved. You loved to hide away in the basement and talk to your mom and do a thousand stupid little things that I’m afraid one day you’ll forget to do.

Now I don’t know if you love anything. You love what they love. You have become the personification of a million people’s angst and hate and despondency. In your makeup, you are their God. In your boots and your chopped black hair you are their hero. You’re no longer a human being to them, but a character that they can stretch and manipulate, a picture they can change until you fit the image that suits them best. When you raise your fist, so do they. When you scream, they echo. You’ve become the general of this…/army/ of followers who worship the ground you walk on.

And when they see you at your weakest, you’re not at your weakest. Your weakest was when you were passed out on my kitchen floor, lying in a puddle of your own vomit and piss. And they scream that they love you and that they would die for you, and yet they’ve never been a target of your drunken screams. They’ve never seen the powder on your nose or the green smoke on your lips or had to hold you while you cried, I fucked up, again!

You’re a character to the world, now. An ethereal, shining character cut and copied and pasted from some more beautiful reality into this mundane, hopeless place.

You’re slipping away from us. From me. I don’t know what’s real about you anymore. Do you curse in front of us because it’s the way you grew up talking or because it’s the way your army follows commands? Do you wear the dark clothes and makeup and hair because you still love the way it hides you, or because that’s the way your fan’s God looks? I can’t help but believe that this is what you are.

And I can’t help but pray to God I’m wrong.