Morden's Journal

I figure I'm supposed to have felt something by now. I mean, that's what happens in all the movies, right? Some guy kills another guy in cold blood and thinks he's gotten away from it, but he can't stand the guilt. You can escape the justice system, but you can never escape yourself. It's an idea as old as Macbeth The Scottish Play (why tempt fate). By now I ought to be hallucinating ghosts or seeing nonexistent blood on my hands. I'd always imagined that, if it ever came to it, taking another person's life would change me. Some intense flood of guilt or, a small part of me always feared, satisfaction. I mean, this was power over life itself. Taking someone's whole future, maybe one even more important or meaningful than my own, and throwing it aside forever. Any future chance at love, friendship, reconciliation, gone. Even the little things, like midnight Matinées, stomping in puddles during the rain when no one's looking, it all falls away forever, just because of me. Surely that moment of absolute power and control would alter the way I went through life.

I've rarely been more completely wrong. I feel nothing. Not remorse, not joy, not even apathy. The event has triggered no emotional response, it merely... was. Like a dog barking or a raindrop falling. Just a part of the world that your mind passes over the moment it's been processed, moving on to more important things ('I could really go for some Chinese Food right now'). It's been two weeks since I pulled the trigger on that pier and watched the man's eyes go from wide eyed panic to frozen stillness before finally blanking out completely, like someone leaving the room who almost forgets to turns the lights off, but remembers at the last second.

From there I'd spent about a week in the hospital, considering the turn of events that had just occurred. Yet every time my mind settled back on that night, it was like a lens had been put over my mind and suddenly I was just an observer, another anonymous face watching from behind a television screen. I guess it's just human nature. A defense mechanism developed over all these years of war and murder in order to make sure the species can keep operating throughout it all. Watching the memory I feel the same way I might if I saw a documentary about starving children in Africa. I know what I'm seeing is wrong, I know that it's against everything I've been raised to value. Yet something prevents me from truly connecting, something blocks the root of the empathy and turns my mind back towards myself.

I wonder if I'm a sociopath. I'm perfectly capable of feeling emotion and being social, I mean. Just the other day I made three new friends, the first three people I've really talked to at length ever since the Pier. I had fun. Even got myself a (hopefully temporary) job. If I were a sociopath, wouldn't I have had to fake that? No, I'm not a sociopath. I think the bullet that enforcer put in me is still there. The surgeons took it out, but they must have missed a piece. It's still there right next to my heart, inuring it to violence and death and bloodshed. Filling my veins with lead. I won't let it change me though.

But some part of me thinks... 'has it'? What if that lead was in my heart all along, just waiting and waiting until the bullet finally stirred it up? What if this is who I am, and denying that nature, that deeply human nature, is just me lying to myself like I've been trained to do all my life.

I need a drink.

The only real solution is moving forward. There's some event going on this Sunday, apparently. The woman who told me about it seemed pretty nice, and with all the crazy shit going on in my life this might be exactly the sort of normality that I need to ground myself back in reality.

Well the open mic went about as well as can be hoped in San Paro. Explosions, the occasional car crash, some scattered gunfire. Half the people there had guns, and I felt rather out of place. It would seem the city I've called my home since birth is no longer... my city. It belongs to the enforcers and the crims, and the only way to keep a part of it is to be one of the people tearing it apart. At least I got a song out of it. One of the people I talked to, Dmitri, seemed nice enough. He was new to the city, had been a club owner back in LA. Everyone else seemed... distant. Their thoughts were elsewhere. It wasn't quite the reminder of normalcy I was looking for, but in hindsight I guess that's a good thing. I told the coffehouse girl that the city needed more stability, but even as I said the words I realized I didn't believe them. I was more trying to convince myself than anything, and I hadn't done a good job of it. The city wasn't going to return to status quo. The city's old way of life-my old way of life, that was gone, probably forever.

All that left room for was change. Adaptation. Somehow, I had to make this new San Paro mine in every way the old one had been. Somehow, I had to forge myself a place here, amidst all the chaos. How, though? It's one thing to decide upon change, it's a completely different matter to bring it about. I do commercial storyboards, for fucksake. How is that a marketable skill in this world of gunfights, theft, and car chases? Part of me is glad, though. When I had been in college, I'd always wanted to be a writer like Hemingway. Someone who'd been out in the world, who'd seen everything there was to see. Who could write so bluntly yet convincingly because he'd lived the very stories he was creating. This was my chance to get outside of the monotony my life had become, to experience life at the knife's edge.

The other part of me reminded myself that Hemingway had committed suicide, broken and alone. My life now might not have been exciting, but it was safe. I could go to another city. I'd have to start from the bottom again, in all likelihood, but I could make it work. Eventually an office of my own, maybe even a partnership.

No. Despite my best efforts, I had changed in those two weeks. Irreversibly. Going back to the way things were wasn't an option. I'd deluded myself that it ever had been. Once you've been shot, your priorities shift. That corner office doesn't quite mean as much when you see how pointless your whole rat race of an existence has been up until that point. It's time for my life to find a purpose somewhere in the bullet strewn streets here.

Where to look, though?

(( Just typed up a full new post and then hit backspace which my computer thought meant I wanted to back up a whole page, deleting the entire post. I'll rewrite it when I stop banging my head against the desk.))