night monster

This morning, I awoke to see this typed in a word document. I’m assuming that I wrote this. My memories of last night are dim at best, thanks to a bit of a spring break “symposium,” if you will. This sounds nothing like me, and I really wish that I hadn’t passed out before I had finished my thought process.

(secretly, I’m horrified that there is another being inside of me that appears only at night)

“The law is a curious thing; the human tear is even curiouser. The law acts as an elastic band, encompassing many things a human may encounter in his or her life experience, but snaps back to place with stern rigidity when its foundation is mangled by a moral err. The human tear, however, is different. Regardless of the side upon which one falls of the broken band, a tear may be shed. The tear, like the law, has a definite shape and form initially. While it resembles a clear bead in the ducts of one’s eye, it loses its shape almost immediately as it descends down the hills and hollows of one’s cheek, expanding and compressing rapidly to adapt to the contours of its fleshy foundation. It is amorphous; there is no moral hierarchy while the tear is in motion, only kinetic energy, only terminal velocity. But once the tear hits the floor with its silent yet deadly impact, it lays flat like a pathetic amoeba, awaiting its turn in the water cycle, only to turn into the tears of a cloud. The tear is broken, the act is done, and all that is left is the salty trail from your toes to your tear ducts, and then the millions of lines from your eye sockets to your synapses and axons and neurons to your brain, from your capillaries to your veins to your arteries to your heart. There is a definite structure and order of the body as there is in the law, but while with law we may discern a definite “because” from a “why,” the reasons behind the trickling of these salty solutions from the well-named lacrimal gland are completely murky.

Why does a mother cry when her child sheds his pacifier for pants? Why does a man cry when he sees another lying dead on the floor in pool of dark red blood, when he himself is holding the smoking gun? Why does a woman look into the mirror on a pale Sunday morning and shed a tear as she sees the dimpled essence of her senescence? If all of these were to follow law, one could easily discern a cause and effect from them, a consequence from an action. The acts of growth and decay are inevitable and natural, and the law’s band does always expand to give reason to them. It does such for death too, especially when terminated by the explosion of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate in one’s body. The effect of giving birth is knowing that the infant will not always be the size of a loaf of bread; the effect of aiming a gun at a man’s stomach and pulling the trigger is his subsequent death; the effect of living is dying. Why then do we, as organisms with the sometimes-burdensome capacity of reasoning, secrete lipids, water, and mucins when we experience certain things?”


And that’s where it stopped.