My Friend Of Misery
“You just stood there screaming,
Fearing no one was listening to you.”
- My Friend Of Misery, Metallica
You sit and you watch and you wait and you hope that she’ll come and she’ll take the pain away. You dream and you hope and you fantasise, never living, never being, never leaving the house. You cry and you scream and you protest that no one understands and never will.
And still the rain beats down on your window.
You blog about it and you tweet about it and you fill a million Facebook status updates about it. You devote a website to your pain and call it real life. You sing and you scream and you cry until you’re blue in the face, until your voice is gone and all that you can utter is the strangled sound of silence.
And still the rain beats down on your window.
You sit and you wonder if this is all life has to offer and, if so, maybe you should just end it all. But you’ve barely begun, you’ve barely lived and, you know what, this isn’t it, not at all. It may be a cliché but you have to know pain to truly know joy, your highs can only ever be as high as your lows are low. Who wants to live their life experiencing nothing but averages?
And still the rain beats down on your window.
So you cut and you bleed and you say it’s the only way that you can cope with the pain. And all of us, those of us who’ve lived, we look at you with contempt, because you don’t even know what pain is. You want pain? Live our lives. Live through the abuse and the betrayal and the loss that we’ve been through and then tell us that your pain is so bad that you have to hurt yourself. Tell us we don’t understand.
And still the rain beats down on your window.
You sit and you watch and you wait and you mistakenly think this is about you.
And still the rain beats down on your window.
Nicolas Papaconstantinou
That’s turned out to be the absolute perfect Monday morning piece, THANKS IAN.
Nice writing, though!
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Andrew Cheverton
Actually, there’s a weird cadence and incidences of rhyme to this that make it read as if it could be a song lyric.
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Rivka Jacobs
A very interesting, moving, thought-provoking piece of writing.
I thought the way you manipulated the second-person POV was brilliant. The story went from the “You” of a quasi-narrator talking to, or about themselves, and then to a “You” as the “other.” The “You” the narrator refers to in the 7th paragraph becomes someone “other” and “outside” — someone younger, more emotionally unstable who can’t take even a fraction of the pain the narrator has experienced, and so cuts themselves to releive their fear and stress.
Then in the last 3 sentences, the “You” refers to a person, or persons — it’s almost the plural “you-all.”
Almost like poetry. Dark and cheerless, except in a strange way, the anger directed at “the other,” is cathartic for the reader, and reflects back to the first paragraph, almost as if to say, “This too shall pass for me, but not for ‘You.’”
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