Notes from a Bad Man
short fiction
If notes are not of boorish quality and intent, they are not notes.
I must call this a confession. I feel there is no other way to articulate this growing guilt. Although I know that this ‘confession’ is merely another attempt to mask my guilt. What is known to me is that a confession lacks the presence of redemption. I will not be rescued or my soul in any way salvaged. A confession is precisely this: an end of the road; knowing that you know not anymore, and therefore must confess! It is of the starved and the driest kind: the inertia of waiting before the end comes for you. The roads have never led anywhere, a confessor would think. You will have spent your body, mind and soul and find more endless discoveries to be spent. A confession is one of them. I will tell you at the outset that I am a bad man. And I am fickle about what word I should choose to clothe my guilt and birth in me an ‘introspective man’.
An ‘introspective man’ is of the most terrible lot — the one who reflects, whose ‘protected’ mind is dislodged from his otherwise cunning mind linked to the rest of the world in unity. He passes his judgement on the world, and through the world, to himself. The introspective man is what every man would want the women to perceive him as. I will not comment on the nature of all men but only comment on my own perceptions and biases. After all, I attempt to be an introspective man and this is what I must do. There are too many introspective men these days, and their sick introspections are of an unbearable beauty!
As I write this confession to quell me of my being — perhaps the only way to express the states of my many minds in words is through the verb. A verb is the statement of flux: an absence of any resting point. Verbs won’t allow the dead to rest in peace too for it will harangue the dead until the time of your own very death (What is rest? Am I confessing to be able to rest, my dear?). Therefore, I will describe my confession as a procession. I proceed. To proceed is the only way to explain.
Before the evil in me caused the world and you to plague, I must admit that I was a good man. A good man like the millions of good men I see every day. I would spare the world my mind for they have hardly gotten along. There is sadness only in the expression of the mind. The mind must not enter the open! The naked, the disrobed, the unclothed… is terrifying if you ask me! We constantly will ourselves to blind! In this, my mind remains a spatial manifestation of thought and never will a time arrive when I or the civilization will deem me to be a ‘thinker’. The details will be spared because there are no details. My dear, the great sadness is that this world is a world of the actus rea — carry on the evidences of justices. Evidence yourself to the air, the jungles, the beggars, the writers… to everyone. To not act is to pay the price of oblivion. I confess, the only things I ever acted upon were of what was not mine, but told to me through the codes of history. I act solely to continue myself into a time I will never evidence. I will have remained a good person forever, I think now, if I kept on till the end of time. My dear, if you keep your history linear, you too will remain a good person forever, unlike me who is beyond any salvage. Go on acting my friends and dears, but never lay bare your heart into this world for you will only suffer, suffer, suffer — not only from the aches of your heart but also from an evil suddenly gushing out like summer water. A thought in me rested, that my heart — constantly at odds with the berserk world will one day provide relief and sympathy, utmost of all to me. And I could never fathom such evil! That such evil too exists in this world that I should disappear from the same universe that inhabits you.
My breath reeks of this failure as I write you my confession to tell you that you must forget me. While I am unable to forget myself, and in that lies my curse. I can now only hope to forego my selfishness someday. To move towards that day and to begin this journey — to tell you my love, I need you to know that you need not know of me. You can burn this away if you wish. I would ask you to, to burn it along with the rest of me and my yesteryear love for you. And in this moment too, I remain selfish, I do not shed, my epidermis is itself. I realise I should not be sending you this confession or even writing this in the midst of a pandemic with the very hope of you reading it. Perhaps I should be an ‘introspective man’ no more. I wish to not affirm myself. Is that an act of affirmation too?
My love, this confession may be an exercise in selfishness but I see this not as an act but a transmission of my sodden mind. I must tell you that I am confessing not to be remembered but to tell you why I must not be remembered. Do not remember me — that is the only and all forgiveness I ask of you. I will be at peace when I know you shall suffer no more at my hands. I consider your memory of me to be at that height of brutality. Only forget, forget, and forget.
I shall be no more brutal than a dictator or a fascist who has abandoned his people, for a dictator has never had any people. If I hope to be a ‘person’ ever, it will be in my condemned to being forgotten, rusted and dissolved into the millions who know not of my evil deeds. Only anonymity will provide me a semblance of this life. There is no greater evil than the one who abandons, I tell you! It is only because I have known of the experience of the forbidden pleasure of abandoning. With shame, I must tell you, there are fragments that have caused in me no regret till this time. That is why I must confess. I will confess all my machinations to you only because it is your eventual loathe that will liberate me. I am a selfish man, and in these moments of crises, I think but of and about me. I think, but I will never be a thinker. Do the alleviation of guilt and charitable expectations lie in an equivalence? I ask you to think, and not respond to me ever. It will take a response to cause a final death in me. Do not allow me to love, my love. Love is above all, a satisfaction of conjoined lonelinesses in a lonely world. Do not be lonely, do not be lonely, because I will after my confession, find myself an outrageously fancy feast without a shred of loneliness. With guilt, I must go ahead and be in the company of the souls of the wonderful breed of the happy. I will leave you be, for my confession will not last. I implore you, to not be lonely anymore.
This confession is about the terror of love. Of being, and never being. What is here is never there. What is not here is always there. My abandoning of you stems from the futility of the future. I know I must loathe myself. For a fact, I will never sustain the quality of your love that resides inside a single dimension. In the pasts, the presents and the far away futures, the sense of your potential loss causes me to run away — as far as our borders would allow, and before the army would catch me crossing the border and torch me to ashes or worse, leaving me out of national registers so I would know not where to go — from the prospect of loss. I cause loss to save myself from loss. Tell me, my dear, the subject of my confession — have you ever known of a selfishness higher than that of a lover? It was of my belief that the only way two people can be in love is to remain away from each other, separated by great mountains and rivers and only to exist in each other’s desires — only that desire is which fuels the state of the world. The desire is the confession I seek. I tell you — the internet has murdered desire! It is the reason why I must confess my unknown pleasures. I need to tell you in underlined words — erase me, wither my presence away like browsing histories. I run away and away and away, only to find myself converging into your arms and hands and soul and body. This spoken unbearable distance is the truest and the highest form of intimacy I have ever witnessed with you. Cast yourself away from swine like me! Breathe, and cause me to breathe. We have hardly taken any breaths when locked in each other’s arms. Forget, forget and forget for I do not hesitate to forget. I am no repentant man. I am slave to the evil in my heart that is far greater than the spent wasteland of the worlds. With the greatest experience of shame, I confess to you that I will abandon again. I am abandoning because I cannot bear. And I wish you would not bear me, even in your loathe. Loathe and forget, and cause this loss of memory for a lifetime of warmth.
I am sure you know by now that I am a bad man and condemned and I need not confess for it. It is terrifying to know that I do not hold power over the reveal of my qualities as a bad man to you. I confess voluntarily to hide away the things you may have seen within me already but not spoken about.
There is no redemption for me, my dear! I am bared before I disappear. I am bared so that I can disappear. To this end of time, road and memory, and mistakes of an unmistakable grieve, I will end this confession. Hardly remember me, if you will.
References who find no reference in my confession but must be referenced nonetheless:
Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes
Love and Garbage, Ivan Klima
