The Ugly Empire

Have you ever hated someone inordinately? Not that you dislike them. No, it’s more than that. Not that you look down on them, or that you think them inferior. That’s part of it, but more cause than effect. Rather, every single thing they say and do causes you untold upset, their very words like daggers stabbing at you, driving you mad in annoyance. The word I’m looking for, I think, is loathing.

A man whose wife cannot stand the presence of him, a decayed, cold, dark and ugly empire, a wasted space, a person whose sum total of existence lies in staring at the television day in and day out, with no confidants, no interests, no reasons, no justifications but the drain of money slipping away, the sound of a life he could not make for himself, while everywhere else things are so much better.

A man who fled his country and his family, who will die alone, whose own children will not care to come to his funeral, a loathsome and inane thing it seems, but a true and painful one. Can you imagine that you spent all your life, and this is what it created? That is, not even naught, but negativity. A vacuuming hole.

And in the last year, I fear I have become that. Over the last year, I’ve become colder, harder, more indifferent to other people, and though sometimes it’s nice to brush everyone and everything off, it is also worrying. I’m being gripped by anger and selfishness to an extent that I’ve never before experienced. I like it. But I am afraid of it.

I know some of it is part of getting older, becoming more sure of ourselves and our actions, but there’s an excess now, overflow and leakage. Since I came home this year, I’ve absolutely despised him, fighting with him every other week. In my house resides a black hole, a quantum singularity of criticism, a lame analogy if ever there was one, a caricature like every other cardboard cut-out, but still, it is a thousand times nastier than any emotion I have felt towards anyone else and this is directed to someone of my blood.

I am becoming him! What a horrible fate but to be condemned to what we cannot tolerate. The person that I was has vanished over the past years. There was once when I was confident that Allah had laid out for me the direction of my life and mine was only to take a seat and monitor my ascent, to the glories of goodness, of beauty, of expression and articulation -- one day, I would be a grand novelist, a famed satirist, a person of success and confidence. But now I have no faith in that and perhaps nothing at all.

Now, I fear, I am alone in an honestly perverse universe. That wishes nothing of me nor offers any point of reference. I am a center of insolence, a man of bursting pride, a star that refuses to accept the death of its helium, but turns to iron itself, making itself metallic. On the outside, yes, I look alive. I can type words and speak sentences, throw barbs and go places, recognize faces and respect spaces. But these would all be deceit.

In fact, I am already dead. I have lived only twenty-three years.