what better person I would be

The strategies by which we summon the will to live on are founded in self deception. They are tainted with imperfection, they are laced with the poison of ambiguity. 

In solace there is a pain coiled inside. In forgetfulness there is a botched burial - thwarted hopes, unrequited loves,  fading friendships. In wisdom there is a vapid acquiescence of fate. And in the heart of sanity there is a seed of absurdity waiting to sprout, biding its time, threatening to grow into an indomitable weed.

Living consists in various stratagems that aim to constantly suppress / repress what life is about, which is change and death. While the world is forever disintegrating beneath our feet, we constantly work at re-materialising it from a handful of elements: the love for a family, a forged idea of oneself, the solace in beauty. We are conjurers of meaning, we pull existential rabbits from threadbare hats.

Most of the time, we are fooled by our own tricks. But there are days when we can see too well through our ploys. One then develops the despondency that comes with clarity of mind.  Or perhaps we are possessed of that clearheadedness that comes with a certain quality of despair: not the type of despair that clouds one’s judgment, but the one that makes you see life for what it is. 
(Life: the dumb and violent affair).

We see men around us who create, lead, live, talk, share, love more intensely than all others. They have that air of contentedness, of fulfillment, of fullness that underlines your own wretchedness, they seem to draw their energy and their radiance from an unlimited source.

And yet you cannot be like them: you know that for all their happiness, for all their achievements, they are the greatest illusionists of all because they have so perfectly fooled themselves. They once built a castle to live in, designed the key to lock themselves with, and then they threw it away, eventually forgetting (o greatest trick of all) that there was a key in the first place. 

There are days when I think: I wish I were this perfect illusionist. I wish I had never seen the cracks in my make-believe world, I wish i never caught sight of the weed that reaches through those cracks. I wish I never had these terrifying, backward, sideways glances at the world coming apart at the seams. I wish I always believed the center can hold. 

Perfectly sedated. Impeccably blind. Stupid but happy. The willing victim of my own elaborate tomfoolery.

What great things I would accomplish then. What better person I would be.