No More Secrets
By John Constantine

Aren't you gonna miss me
Aren't you gonna even say
One thing to me
Anymore
    - Crash Test Dummies

As I write this, I should be doing something else.  Something very boring, very tedious, and something that someone else should be doing anyway.

But I sneak away and start pounding on this miniature keyboard like a drug addict.  At times, it's the only thing that seems worth while.

I sometimes wonder if honesty is all it's cracked up to be.  From personal experience, I've found that sometimes the kindest thing you can do is sometimes keep your big mouth shut and let sleeping dogs lie.

But I seem to have a genetic disorder similar to Tourette's syndrome.  Try as I might there are some things that I simply cannot keep to myself.  I find myself out in the kennels banging the dog food dishes against the chain link fence.  Waking the carnivores from their peaceful slumber.

And they're angry.  Hungry.  And I suddenly notice that they have really large teeth.  And they are all very curious as to what has woken them up from such peaceful dreams.

And so with the emotionless force of a jackhammer, I start to pound out the truth in sentences far too long and tedious to be grammatically correct.  And I see the result as the ego of someone I love lies crushed beneath the impact of repeated blows of unvarnished honesty.

 Who is this person?  I see the question in those beautiful eyes.  I see the head hang between the hands like the head of a "Raggedy Anne" doll.  Limp.  Broken.

And I get ready for the next round of pummeling.  I squeeze the trigger on this jackhammer of truth and I feel the power course through it as it slams into realities that can no longer preserve their integrity.  I see the wince as years of belief structures crumble like chalk.  The fine powder that forms the residue of newly shattered realities swirls in the dust devil produced by this instrument of complete and utter destruction.

But I can't stop.

And I'm not being asked to.

That piece of me which allows me to isolate myself from my feelings of empathy is now in full control.  There is an icy calm that envelopes me.  I can no longer react to what I'm doing, I just do it.

And I'm still holding back, as unbelievable as that seems.  This is now the fifth or sixth session we've had over the last month or so.  Each time has seen the stripping away at the illusions I've unconsciously constructed.

Revealing the painful truth that I am not what I appear to be.  Not what this person thought I was, and certainly not what I wanted to be.

And I don't know what else to do.  The hammering continues until the sound is like the roar of the ocean.  A continuous source of white noise that seems to wrap all the other signals in my environment with a thick blanket of fog.

I reach up and wrap this fog around me, taking comfort in its bitter cold.  I feel myself sliding away, becoming very small.  I start to disassociate and find that I can now hold this small image of myself as I would a doll.

And then I smash it on the ground and let the jackhammer have its wicked way with it.  I see the pieces shatter in slow motion, like some sort of bizarre Matrix-like effect.

And then I suddenly stop.  I walk over to the door and casually light up a cigarette.  I take a long draw from it and blow the smoke into the wind.  The fog is heavy outside and I can smell the sea air as it hangs thick around me.

I stare at the smoke as it mixes with the fog and I start to wonder why I started this process in the first place.

What was I trying to do?  What was the actual goal?  Why am I doing this?

And I can't find any answers.  Like most of my life, I seem to have little, if any actual input as to what happens.  Sure, I scream and bitch as much as the next person about life.  But on a fundamental level, I know that it is just window dressing.

What did I want to accomplish with this massive destruction that I've been unleashing on myself?

Nothing.  Well, nothing now.  You see, all this is about intent and what I would like to do, what I would wish I could do, but what I haven't done.

What the Universe apparently won't let me do, despite my best efforts at trying desperately to accomplish it.

Now that part of me which has the capability of feeling is now surging back into control.  I snap back into my body, and I no longer have the sensation of being in two places at once.  I see the threads of fate burning in the air in front of me as clear as I can see the cigarette I'm tracing them with.

I'm not sure which is worse.

The feeling of helplessness when you are desperate to do something you can't do and shouldn't do, but want to do anyway.

Or the feeling of impotence when you do have the power to do something, but don't have the will to actually do it, because it is the absolute wrong thing to do.

I gasp at the pain caused by the feelings of warmth generated by this emotional part of my psyche.  I didn't realize how thoroughly I had become a block of ice - completely devoid of warmth.  And so when the emotional blood starts to sluggishly move throughout the system the nerves that were offline suddenly become very annoyed at the condition I've gotten them into.

Somewhere deep within me I can start to catch a glimpse of what it is I started out to do.  I now can see why I had to destroy these useless, outdated fantasies of what I am - of what I was.

And so I step out over the cliff and simply fall into that warm ocean again.  I can feel the salt of life stinging the raw nerves as it envelopes my newly exposed soul.  I can actually feel the new growth as it reacts to this new environment I've carved out of the featureless form of rock that stood before me hours ago.

But then I snap back to this reality.

That which I describe took place many, many weeks ago.  What I've been experiencing is just the movie that was taken that day.  The little recorder in my mind that may - or may not - actually be objectively correct.  I realize that this little psycho drama is actually a highly fictionalized account, colored by the filters that I had carelessly left on that camera in my mind.

I sweep up the pieces of the shattered doll laying at my feet and feel the insignificant weight of the supposedly all destroying jackhammer I was tearing this doll to pieces with.

It certainly looks tiny now.  Almost trivial.

I'm not sure what to do.  It looks all so silly, just lying there on the floor in a pile of dust.  I poke my finger in it and start drawing patterns as if this was a Zen garden.

I look over at this person who participated in this bizarre act with me and I'm glad that the morality play is over.  We've now shed these little dolls that we've been imagining as ourselves and move on with the process of actually interacting.

The shattering of illusions is painful, but in the end one sees how small and trivial they were in the first place.

We compress ourselves into these tiny creations of ours, imagining that they are what we really are.  And when we're in these images of ourselves, things take on gigantic proportions.

But after the dust clouds settle, you find that a new perspective can change the relative sizes of things.  You stop looking through the eyes of these small creations of yours and wonder how you ever thought that this is what you actually were.

The illusion is broken and you have - for the moment at least - freedom from the forms that have held you so tightly that you never knew there could be anything else.

I lay my head on the couch and sigh.

I look over at the dust that was my shell and wonder at the patterns I idly drew during my thoughts.  I look at the swirls and realize that even destruction has the roots of beauty, pattern and purpose.

Twenty Eighth of August, Two Thousand and One.